This new take on the traditional mountain cabin by Ofis architects is so fresh and clean. The house may be Slovakian but is absolutely the brand of authenticity that Australian builder makers need to channel when rebuilding the homes so brutally lost in the recent Victorian bush fires.
The ultimate Italian property fantasy for many of us pretty well begins and ends here: a recycled medieval oasis, complete with secret garden, Roman wall, and just a stone’s throw from the borderline pandemonium of Stazione Termini and Santa Maria Maggiore… These days more dream than temptation perhaps?
Still we can all take heart. The house – product of the unlikely union of a disused bakery and former dairy – is not on the market. Instead its odd, beautiful rooms are home to the (much envied) Milan-born collector, and PR consultant to the architectural profession, Paola Maugini.
Four long years in the making, Vegetal designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and produced by Vitra is a chair with a very long tail… In fact, as the story goes, one that leads all the way back to the gardens of the 19th century, to a time when young plants were painstakingly trained to grow in the form of chairs… But this just released work by the French duo is much more ode than parody. With Vegetal it was important for the Bouroullecs and Vitra to create not just an evocative visual rendition of a chair inspired by plants but also to replicate their natural growth patterns within the very process of mass manufacture. (Suddenly the four year time line starts to feel reasonable.)
No doubt destined to be a Vitra centre piece in Milan in April, the intrinsic goodness of Vegetal, I think, makes it a very suitable new chair for such troubled times as ours…
Looking surprisingly restful and oasis-like really, (I love the way the white gravel seems to mirror the sky in this shot) this ex-industrial Soho courtyard is perhaps not so much an outdoor room as a private transition space. Giving the loft-dwellers above a leafy moment to steel themselves before hitting the street.
A footnote to my post a little while back on the Ibiza house with the fabulous floor, this little piece of summer heaven is the loggia of the same house. And since I’ve become something of a collector of outdoor rooms of late (and am writing this in the heat of a quintessentially Australian summer evening) I just had to add it to the catalogue!
I just really, really want this house. I love it. And this time it actually has nearly nothing to do with the glorious (northern) Italian location. It’s just a graceful, not too big, beautiful house that is just about all I could wish for, that happens to be on the Lago di Como not far from Varenna! Designed by local architect Arturo Montanelli I think this might be as close to the wine concept of terroir as it gets for modernist architecture. But the really remarkable thing about this house is the palette.
The architect, to his eternal credit, implies no hierarchy in his materials, new or traditional. For Montanelli, I suspect, every element – from the local stone, the timber and the traditional polished plaster to the (exquisitely executed) off-form concrete – is there, first and foremost, to do a job. And to do it as well or better than any other material could at this point in time and in this setting. Such a simple message, but one many architects and designers out there could afford to consider more often. The idea that the materials can almost select themselves if we let them is no cop-out. It’s just about putting ego aside and letting context and the lessons of the past have a say. And the results, as in this house, speak for themselves.
I’m quite certain the view from this Florentine terrace looks nothing like this so soon after New Year’s. But Melbourne in January can give rise to bursts of serious longing for somewhere just like it to while away the odd long summer afternoon. Renaissance views aside. I don’t know how, but the Italians all over Italy have just about perfected my idea of the ultimate outdoor room.
I think it’s the same spirit they bring to the business of camping (where an entire tent is given over to the function of the often not so makeshift kitchen). All the pleasure of the great outdoors with none of that tiresome improvising with collapsing card tables and mismatching chairs, while encircled by a delightful herbacious border! The height of civilisation really.
I am captivated this post-industrial Milan courtyard, the forecourt to the abode (and, as I write, temporary retail outlet) of fashion designer Antonio Marras. The unlikely, solitary olive tree (a reference to the stylist’s own Sardenian roots), perfectly proportioned, seems to pin the tiny piazza to the earth in a way the concrete walls do not, or cannot. Guarding like a sentry. A living talisman in a city where good fortune can seem in short supply perhaps? And almost as much as the olive, I love the timber floor. Stitched together from old railway sleepers and, just like the tree, delightfully unexpected.
In a move at once absurd and irrestistible for its particular brand of designer logic, Nendo/Oki Sato turns decoration on its head in the interiors of this old wooden house on Tokyo’s Shibuya river. The desire to link the remodelled interiors to the characteristic, moss-patterned river banks outside is central, the designer explains. But tossing up then between a traditional 2-D ‘vegetal-themed’ wallpaper approach and the potentially excessive gesture of cladding walls entirely in moss, the Japanese wonder boy opted for a third way: dry moss carefully arranged to look like wallpaper… Logical, right? But to borrow from Oki Sato himself, the real “!” moment for me is that shock of royal blue carpet… Unexpected for a nano second, then immediately the perfect shade… A little bit like looking at nature really.
A celebration of timber, sea air and themes nordic… This beautifully compact timber house by London based Studiomama charms from the get go. First for its pure form: easy to read, tall, like a child’s drawing come to life. And then for something else entirely – the idea that, maybe, living can be this simple again…
