A sublimely detailed yet robust new house in South London features face brickwork and brass hardware reminiscent of both the 1970′s and Victorian traditions. I love the bare ceilings too, downlights banished in favour of strategically placed pendant lights, at least one of them in brass.
With its ‘flat pack’ facade and intelligent floor plan this house overlooking the North Sea by young Swedish architect Johannes Norlander feels like the future.
In Italian it’s called ‘bellezza aqua e sapone’. The sort of natural glow that comes from feeling good inside your own skin. For me, this house by Rotterdam architects Pasel Kuenzel is that kind of beauty.
Young design masters of understatement, Outofstock, absolutely nail it in Singapore for the new all day breakfast cafe’, Hatched.
The Idaho desert comes in from the cold in this house by American architects Olson Kundig.
The most remarkable rooms are often the ones that, on paper, really shouldn’t work but do.
Architects do frugal better than anyone. Without doubt the best office spaces I’ve worked in have been shoe string fitouts - all open plan painted doors on trestles and black angle poise lights arranged (with shambolic flair) within a lofty post-industrial shell. Spaces loved and admired by staff and visitors alike, precisely because they never felt like they were trying too hard. They were authentic.
Fast forward to Paris where, this time, thanks to two young architects (ex studio Jean Nouvel) intent on making their own way and a home for themselves and a young family, the tradition continues.
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.
