house of lightness and glass.

I love floor to ceiling glass, allowing the inside and outside to coexist, bringing light in and blurring the boundaries between outside and in. Glass boxes, however, where the glass forms two or three sides and a ceiling, can so easily feel cold and clinical. Perhaps it has much to do with the climate in this country, but I can’t think of anywhere I’d less rather be on a cold, grey day.

This addition, however, feels like a place I would like to be. Perhaps it is the sculptural quality – not a box, but an architectural form with a raking roofline. Perhaps the interplay of solid white planes with the glass, or the double height space allowing the light to plunge through the volume. Contrasting against the darker, more formal spaces of the original house – lounge, study, dining room – are the lighter, informal areas of the new – the open plan kitchen and casual living. Vertical voids cut through the house to unite the cellar, ground and first floors, allow light to filter down gradually, creating beautiful shards of light and shadow.

The joinery and furniture is kept simple and rectilinear, further emphasising the lightness of the space, with pale ceramic flooring (not timber, which would fade over time in the sunlight), and glass stair treads.

Glass house in Winchester, England, by AR Design Studio, via

More wonderful spaces, here

at the fair – the mid century show.

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Once you have your Richard Neutra-designed home (see my previous post, here), you will need to furnish it. Here’s my take on last Sunday’s Mid Century show at Lord’s in North London; a wonderful trove of Scandinavian classic furniture, simple, functional lighting, local salvage, industrial pieces, jewellery, art and ephemera. Forty seven businesses were represented, here are just a few of my favourites:

1. These gorgeous ducks also have the most wonderful provenance:

One particular spring day in 1959 in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, a policeman found the time to stop the traffic in order to let a young duck family pass. It was a meaningful enough event to the passers-by that all the newspapers published a now famous photograph of the ducks. This captured moment ‘encapsulates the Danish attention to nature and detail and the ability to appreciate small everyday miracles’. Inspired by the duck family, Hans Bølling designed this pair of small wooden duck figures.

Duck and Duckling in teak by Hans Bølling 1959 at Elliot and Tate, specialists in finding and rsstoring the vintage Danish Furniture of Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, amongst others.

2. Lovely and Company are an on-line vintage furniture store based in Brighton, UK.

One gets the same thrill scratching around here as any flea-market – they carry a clever mix of 20^th Century design classics alongside soda crates and multi-drawer haberdashery chests. Ferm Living is represented, along with House Doctor and Tas-ka. They carry reams of Eames original fibreglass shells (the new version of the chair is in polypropylene), which can be mounted on new walnut bases.

3. Beautiful mid-century art at Saunders Fine Art, specialists in Modern British and European painting (all images, Saunders Fine Art). Clockwise from top left:

Esbjörn (Bo) Lassen, Still Life, Daily News, Watercolour, 1946

Douglas Swan, Composition, Mixed media on paper, 1962

Jürgen Von Konow, Lowering the Nets, Oil on canvas1949

4. Based in Victoria Park, East London, The Modern Warehouse specialise in buying and selling mid century modern furniture and accessories from Scandinavia, U.S.A. and the UK. The collection is made up entirely of original vintage pieces, not reproductions.

5. The Modernist based in a wonderful little antique emporium in North London, is one of my favourite haunts: stunning vintage Georg Jensen silver jewellery along with other precious pieces, all from early to mid-century and all fabulous. I wrote about The Modernist in an earlier blog post on the Hampstead Emporium, here.

6. Vintage Unit source and refurbish industrial furniture, lighting & accessories, with examples from Britain and the continent from the post war period. Their pieces are beautifully refurbished things of beauty as well as utility. Practical but decorative and collectable in their own right.

7. Retrouvius is a stalwart in the architectural salvage business, full of wonderful reclamation pieces. They have released a book, Reclaiming Style, outlining the Retrouvius ‘re-use’ philosophy, from sourcing material at demolition sites and filtering this into the warehouse to adapting materials for re-use in homes via their in-house design practice. I loved the stacks of worn, colourful aluminium pendants.

8. Twentieth Century Antiques are Edinburgh based, and specialise in modern design from 1920-1970. I rather liked the idea of the Jacobsen Egg chair, Danish rosewood sideboard and original Picasso exhibition poster on display in my own home…

9. A fabulous array of classic lights including the sweet Pinnochio desk lamp from Augustus Greaves, who specialise in architect designed, post war modernist pieces (and have a beautiful web-site, as well).

Which pieces would you like to see in your home?

All images owl’s house london, unless noted otherwise.

More happenings, here.

a perfect case study.

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The case study houses of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s have long been my idea of the perfect contemporary home – open plan, maximum glazing, simple, functional. Perhaps the climate helps (these homes were most often built in California), but they seem to embody a free and easy lifestyle and optimism. Post war construction methods and new materials made the houses possible, and yet…

The Case Study house program stated that: each ‘house must be capable of duplication and in no sense be a individual performance.. It is important that the best material available be used in the best possible way in order to arrive at a ‘good’ solution of each problem, which in the overall program will be general enough to be of practical assistance to the average AmerIcan in search of a home in which he can afford to live…’ I just adore this philosophy.

Nine architects were involved in the initial scheme, including Richard Neutra and Charles Eames. I have often wondered how they could get these simple, easy-to-build forms so right; contemporary architecture today very often loses sight of its modernist roots.

Now a new partnership between the son of Richard Neutra, and the California Architecture Conservancy, means one can license the right to build from the plans of Richard Neutra. More about the scheme, here. Neutra (1892-1970), one of the most important of the mid-century modernist architects, became famous for the simple geometries of his designs, which were often made of steel and glass, and the prefabricated elements that made them extremely easy to build. Known for rigorously geometric yet open and airy structures, Neutra blended the interior and exterior of a space such that it would ‘place man in relationship with nature; that’s where he developed and where he feels most at home’. This philosophy grew from a feeling that “our environment is often chaotic, irritating, inhibitive and disorienting. It is not generally designed at all, but amounts to a cacophonous, visually discordant accretion of accidental events, sometimes euphemized as ‘urban development’ and ‘economic progress’’’.*

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 (not all were the case study models, but too good not to show).

A very funny account of what it must be like to live in a mid-century modern home with children, here

More wonderful spaces, here. And my take on the fabulous mid-century modern show at Lord’s in London this past weekend on next Thursday’s post…

* Quotation from Neutra’s biography, Life and Shape, available from this dreadful-looking Neutra web-site..

house in a wren tower.

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Just back from the beautiful Brecon Beacons and days filled with sunshine, dappled light and daffodils. And most challengingly, no internet! So with no post on Monday this week, we begin with Thursday’s post… I can’t quite imagine calling a Grade 1 listed, Sir Christopher Wren-designed tower in central London home. If I could, this is what I hope it would look like.

Alterations were made to Christ Church tower, to form a single family house over twelve (12!) levels. Masterfully restrained, the palette is of wood floors and white painted walls. A curved glass handrail, simply pinned off the concrete stair, winds ever upwards; the upper-most level is connected by the narrowest, wood, double-tread stair. Landings allow moments to pause, furnished with beautiful classic pieces.

Christ Church tower, London by Boyarsky Murphy Architects

Another house on many levels, here

lights by flos.

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How do you make a relatively uninspiring product – a recessed downlight – look exciting and new? Here’s how.

Reminiscent of a Mondrian painting in contemporary colours, it takes a second look to realise these beautifully styled, geometric images are actually spotlights, downlights, linear strip lights.

Photography, Carl Kleiner for Flos, here

More found objects, here

house of 150 trees.

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One of the most important elements of good design is context – the way a building sits within its environment, or the way the setting influences the design. Just as design is a response to a set of needs or problems, context shapes the design response. Without context there is only art or decoration. This beautiful Danish summerhouse is a perfect example of context in design – the owner harvested 150 pine trees from the land, then cut them into beams to build his home.

Wood in its different guises create the horizontal planes – panels of ply on the ceiling, knotty pine floor boards. The interconnecting vertical planes are of complimentary materials – steel, glass and brick – all kept in their raw state. A towering, angled chimney made of blonde, double-long bricks sits centrally within the open-plan space, housing the fireplace and oven. A white concrete bench top wraps around the chimney from the kitchen to the living area. The house features large floor-to-ceiling windows, the glazing angling up and folding over to form the roof, creating views up and beyond the trees to the sky. Over the kitchen and dining area, a matte-black roof follows the same plane, then breaks form and folds straight outward, hovering above a patio. Adjacent to the main house is the studio, whose slanted exterior beams and horizontal knotty pine walls repeat those of the primary structure.

The exposed, galvanized-steel framing is echoed in the pendant lamps over the dining table and chair legs; the table was made from the same pine that was milled on-site.

Summerhouse, via dwell and http://www.brask-leonhardt.dk/

More good design series, here. More wonderful spaces, here.

vertigo.

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I spied this pendant lamp in the interiors of beautiful spaces long before I managed to find out any more about it. I have now tracked it down, and it’s of French provenance: Vertigo by Constance Guisset. Reminiscent of a parasol, or a wide brimmed hat; it is incredibly light which means it becomes mobile when it catches a breeze, turning and floating. And casting the most wonderful, graphic shadows.

images 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

It comes in black, turquoise, copper, white and big and small: 2m diameter (500g weight) and 1.4m.

What do you think of Vertigo? Would you have one in your space?

More found objects, here

owl's house london.

a design sourcebook about modernism, minimalism, motherhood and other Very Important Things

house of lightness and glass.

at the fair – the mid century show.

a perfect case study.

house in a wren tower.

lights by flos.

house of 150 trees.

vertigo.

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