Homebuyers "moving away from open-plan spaces" says Albert Hill of The Modern House
Marcus Fairs | 9 December 2020
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/12/09/homes-open-plan-spaces-albert-hill-modern-house/
Homebuyers "moving away from open-plan spaces" says Albert Hill of The Modern House
Marcus Fairs | 9 December 2020
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/12/09/homes-open-plan-spaces-albert-hill-modern-house/
If it’s difficult to tear yourself away from this meandering residence in Los Angeles that architects Dean L. Pratt and Hugh Huddleson designed for their clients, that was just their intention. “The homeowners wanted to be able to wander and feel as if they were in a park-like setting–they wanted a property they never felt compelled to leave,” says Pratt. Granting their clients’ wish meant imagining a bright-white stucco-clad house that calls to mind the designs of early 20th-century architect Irving Gill and boasts a serpentine plan that connects to the dynamic 2-acre landscape at almost every turn. “There are views to courtyards, gardens and ponds on two sides of nearly every room,” Pratt says. “No matter where you are in the house or the landscape, you’re engaged.”
While the rambling feel of the layout was inspired by the clients’ desire for a complex experience, the aesthetic was informed by their history. “The husband’s family has lived in Los Angeles for generations and so we thought about early California Spanish Colonial architecture as well as the early modernists in Southern California, particularly Gill,” Huddleson says. “The house is a fusion of those two things. It capitalizes on the softness and the poetry of Spanish Colonial style and also has some of the minimalism and understatement of early modernism.”
The home is marked by white stucco walls, terra-cotta roof tiles and the dark-stained Douglas fir of the garage doors. On the interior, more stained Douglas fir canopies the voluminous living room, where terra-cotta tile floors and stained-wood windows add warmth and texture. “Almost all of the other rooms pinwheel off the living room,” Huddleson says. “The clients wanted a big room with lots of light.” In fact, the clients wanted every room to be filled with sunlight. “The husband followed the sun around inside his previous house,” Huddleson says, so he and Pratt planned for the breakfast room and the kitchen of the new house to face east and open onto a large sun-drenched courtyard with a fountain; the south-facing office looks to an expansive lawn and two ponds. “And the pool area has the perfect afternoon sun exposure for sitting and having a glass of wine,” Huddleson says. “We created a multiplicity of outdoor spaces to discover and spend leisure time in. There are gardens they won’t go in every day, but that they will continually rediscover.”
Designer Luis Ortega let the architecture and the outdoors take the spotlight and took a soft approach to furnishings. “The colors are subdued while the texture is more intense,” he says. “A wall in the master suite is a shade of pale green. It makes sense because there’s so much greenery that surrounds the room.” The designer adorned the vaulted ceiling and the walls of the kitchen with neutral-toned Moroccan tile with a shiny finish. “The math involved in applying that tile to the complex curves of the parabola was one of the more challenging experiences,” says general contractor Shawn Lannen. But the luminous effect of the perfectly laid tiles is a sight to behold. “The glaze changes the tile color while it bakes so they’re all slightly different,” says Ortega. In the living room, the designer used mostly shades of yellow and taupe and covered the sofas in sand-colored fabric and a pair of armchairs in pale yellow. The clients, who are art collectors, asked Ortega to conceive a frieze that wraps around the room. “During the 1920s and ’30s a lot of California interior architecture had murals like this,” the designer says. “We found an amazing painter and asked him to create images that express the California landscape from the early days of the pueblo to today.” Ortega also hung the couple’s collection of vintage Mexican hats above the fireplace.
The gardens, spearheaded by landscape designer Jamie Schwentker, are equally as impressive as the home and its interiors. “The gardens adjacent to the house are more formal,” Schwentker relates. “There’s a progression toward naturalism and asymmetry as you move away.” The front entrance garden with its circular motor court is defined by a canopy of mature native California Coast Live Oak trees, a variety of white flowering vines planted on the walls of the house and attached trellises, and by a mass of white shrub roses. In what Schwentker refers to as the “night garden”–an enclosed, private garden which can be viewed and entered only from the formal dining room and the master suite–he planted lavender among other flora. Blue-flowering jacarandas and orange-flowering silk oak trees are at the pool terrace. “We also planted wisteria vines on the piers of the pool pergola so the panicles can hang down from the wood beams,” Schwentker says. Elsewhere on the property are two large ponds and two stone waterfalls, conveying a sense of timelessness.
It’s not only the romantic grounds that look timeless. In taking its cues from early vernacular forms as well as Gill, the home seems to transcend the years yet engenders a sense of comfort and ease. “This is a place for understated living that’s not lacking in elegance,” Pratt says. “It’s a place you can always have tea somewhere you’ve never had it before.”
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Practiced meditators believe in the life-changing power of inner stillness. Among its many other benefits, they say, it can also loosen fixed viewpoints and open us to other possibilities. California-based designer Stewart Allen, a meditation practitioner for 25 years, knows this to be true. Still, it was wondrous for him to observe the way the concept of stillness impacted the design of a Scottsdale home. In initial meetings, his clients—serial home builders with two grown daughters and seven grandchildren—wanted “something that relates to the desert, but with a very calming, spa-like and sophisticated interior,” says the wife. When they introduced the word “Zen” as a descriptor, the idea both pleased and mystified Allen, who asked, “Do you want a cup-of-green-tea-on-a-cedar-tray Zen?” To which the wife replied, laughing, “You know my taste Stewart. Let’s call it glamour Zen.”
Leaving their designer to ponder that dichotomy, the clients decamped to the Amangiri resort in Canyon Point, Utah, for a vacation that would prove transformative. “When we drove up to the resort, it looked like it just emerged out of the desert,” recalls the wife. “It was so lovely, warm and quiet, with beautiful wood, lighting and stone details.” The place filled them with a sense of well-being and confirmed their instincts that their desire for a contemporary home that both reflected the environment and was welcoming could be achieved.
Having built about 30 homes with San Francisco-based architect Hugh Huddleson, the couple leaned on him again to manifest the serenity they hoped to achieve in earthly dimensions. Huddleson admits being influenced by one of modern architecture’s masters. “Frank Lloyd Wright has been with me since I was 6,” he says. “The stone in this house is a little like Taliesin, and there are also similarities with his Hollyhock House. But I was more interested in paring it down to geometric gestures, so it looked like abstracted boulders and rock ledges in the landscape.”
The resulting floor plan comprises several distinct zones that pinwheel off the living room. “The massing of these zones is similar in size to nearby boulders, and the profile of the house follows those features along the line of the adjacent ridge,” explains Huddleson. “The roofline mirrors the slope of the ridge.” Huddleson kept the material vocabulary abbreviated—limestone, white oak and cedar mixed with plenty of glass. “To blend into a landscape, a house should coherently limit its geometries to three or four notes,” he adds. One type of limestone used liberally on the vertical surfaces came carved with chevrons. “My eyes were on every piece as we cut it, because there is veining going through it that had to be matched,” recalls builder Glenn Farner. And when it came to wrapping the living room fireplace in the same material, he discovered, “You couldn’t cut it on a 45-degree angle to create mitered corners because it’s very soft and chips.” His solution was to employ quirk miter corners (where the angled edges of the slabs are leveled rather than left sharp), and then fill the corners with siliconized grout.
From a materials standpoint, Allen sparked the Zen concept by introducing contrasting bronze-leaf limestone tile on the fireplace. He also insinuated subtle shimmer throughout in the silk rugs, gold glass tiles in the master bathroom, the bronze luster of leather wrapping the bar, metallic thread woven into the fabric of the dining room chairs, and custom bronze furniture pieces. “The bronze front door is my design and it sets the tone as you enter the home,” he says.
Allen describes his aesthetic as simple. “I like it very clean, with a consistent element,” he explains. “For example, a wall color, a cabinet style or flooring. The client liked the idea of a thread of consistent finishes, so our intentions were to keep it elegant, clean and lustrous.” So the same white oak on the floors is used on the kitchen cabinetry, and the carved limestone, along with hand-troweled plaster, envelops every space, achieving a sense of calm that serves as a foil for the torrid landscape. “You walk from the coarse midday, from the scorching reality of the desert into a really soft oasis,” he adds. To offset the monochromatic environment, Allen introduced bold surprises, including a fireplace in the master bedroom with a black granite base that is swathed in copper leather, metallic glass-bead lamp shades in the living room, and more ornate trims on pillows around the space. The subtle sheen of the material choices also shifts character throughout the day as it picks up and plays with the light.
Unlike many of the other houses the couple have built over the years, they consider this one to be long-term. “Our other homes were just projects, but this one felt like it might be the last one we build,” says the wife. “So it became our residence, as opposed to some place we were just going to live in for awhile.” It took two years to get everything right, but the patience paid off and is reflected in the tranquility of the spaces. “It’s a sanctuary,” she concludes. “The desert is armored; almost everything is sharp. The beauty of our house is that the exterior relates to the environment, and the interior is the soft landing in the middle of it.”
The house sits on a dense site facing Carmel Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Our clients were keen to be fully cognizant of this amazing setting in all areas of the home. As such the house was conceived as a central room comprised of the courtyard, living room, and bedroom, bordered by niche spaces for the kitchen, breakfast nook, office and master bath. Fully folding doors/walls adjacent to the courtyard from the living room and bedroom literally open the full space up, and the rhythmic edge of vertical screen elements (solid mahogany and steel) create a loose border that stretches and compresses along its lengths.
Viewed at an angle, the screen reads opaque, but viewed closely or straight through, the screen is visibly porous allowing both light and air to travel through and across the central space. All other rooms on the main floor abut this border screen, creating a reference of place throughout the house, and providing a dynamic reading of visual connections as one moves through the space. This central heart of the house is protected from strong seawater winds of the ocean by a glass roof, designed to allow for clear views upward and to maintain a warm center space.
The steel columns that anchor the steel cable and strut trusses are integrated into the vertical wood screen – matching the changing rhythm and yet independently identified by a deep charcoal color. When a sweeping breeze is needed, the large sliding windows between the office and the courtyard are easily opened to allow full cross-ventilation. The house lives and breathes through the courtyard, and our clients live fully in this “large” room, even soaking in the Japanese Ofuro installed beneath the glass roof to watch the evening sky.
The second floor is accessed by an exterior cantilever stair, which is structurally and materially integrated into the vertical screen system. Atop the house is a small second floor enclosure between two porches with dramatic views. This space is primarily used as a meditation room – and the large scooped skylight draws attention towards the changing blue of the sky and movement of the stars. Hidden below the inset Tatami floor is a guest mattress, ready to be revealed for guests to sleep among the cypress treetops.
Images: © David Matheson
In Hawaii, precise distinctions are made about the character of the sea —the inshore water is kai, the deep blue sea is moana. This house on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island is ideally positioned for access to both—as well as to take advantage of that other Hawaiian blessing, the soft, refreshing wind, makani olu olu. Its site is not far from where the futuristic movie Waterworld was filmed, and it too is water-themed. The water features—waterfalls, pools and a meditation garden with flowing water—are not merely aesthetic enhancements; they also have practical uses, along with sentimental associations. The primary inspirations for them were the owners' passion for sailing and love of Hawaii and its encircling ocean.
The house is sheltered and private and yet also occupies a magnificent vantage point. One of its striking aspects is the way in which it seems part of the pools that surround it. As architect Hugh Huddleson puts it, the house was intended as "a soulful extension of its environment."
"One great way of creating the notion of space is to use water," says the East Hampton, New York-based Huddleson, who collaborated on the design with Warren Sunnland, of the Hawaiian firm Riecke Sunnland Kono Architects. "In Venice," Huddleson says, "you can be 12 feet away from another house and yet feel apart, because of the water in between." And so, on this relatively small site in Hawaii, water creates space, stifles noise and is itself a calming element.
The use of wood and the volcanic stone in the rock wall at the Asian-style gateway, and the glimpse of the mahogany footbridge across the water beyond, promises an experience of entry that offers more inside. It is impossible to build a house next to the ocean and assume that the hard, unforgiving sunlight and the salt air will not seriously affect it. These challenges dictated the materials for the house, which the architect designed to last.
The Zen concept of wabi-sabi—the noble weathering of natural things, like wood and iron and cloth—guided both Huddleson and the California-based interior designer Jacques Saint Dizier. They chose high-quality materials that would age gracefully. This is why the lanais are built of mahogany rather than cedar. And the volcanic rock, which is used throughout the exterior, was positioned to suggest that it might have occurred naturally. Travertine marble was used both inside and outside. The cut blocks for the exterior walls were offset to carve graceful slivers of shadow under the deep eaves.
"The size of the lot was a challenge," Huddleson says. In fact, it is such a modest-size lot that before the owner bought it, he needed Huddleson's reassurance that it could accommodate a house and guesthouse—five bedrooms and six baths altogether. Huddleson came up with the footprint in a day but then took a year to plan and refine the structures. Illusion figured, too: "I used the longest diagonal possible to pull your eye across the pool, so that you look across the lengths of water to the sea."
To make the interior of the house unfussy, even playful and durable, and yet with a certain formality, Saint Dizier chose textured reeds for some of the walls, textural fabrics, even copper leaf. Small bronze tiles are set in the floor of an elegant bath. These are stylized petroglyphs depicting each member of the family's favorite outdoor pursuits—surfing, swimming, tennis and sailing.
The volumes of the high-ceilinged rooms are generous and restful. And the art walls are deliberate. The owner possesses a collection of early paintings of Hawaiian landscapes and seascapes, along with contemporary work, such as the koa-framed panels of tapa (kapa in Hawaiian) by Puanani Van Dorpe that hang in the living room. The paintings and artifacts, says the designer, "make you feel very grounded and Polynesian."
But Saint Dizier admits that Japanese, Chinese, Balinese and Pacific island elements influence the style of his various designs. The masks in one bath are whimsical, but the columns in that same space are in fact old African drums. Elsewhere, rare ceramics and antique bowls are not far from more curious objects—a boat prow or an upright oar. The serene atmosphere is accomplished both by the interiors and by the way the outdoors seems to be part of the inner experience of the house. That is also the effect of water, which is not simply the sight of it falling but the sound of it, the feel of it.
"Hugh came up with the idea of cantilevering the house," Saint Dizier says. "It seems to float."