Optical Glass House

Location: Hiroshima, Japan
Design: Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Co.

A tree-filled courtyard is glimpsed through the shimmering glass-brick facade of this house which is sited among tall buildings in Hiroshima, overlooking a street with many passing cars and trams.


Although located downtown, the house enables residents to enjoy the changing light and city moods, as the day passes, and live in awareness of the changing seasons.


To obtain privacy and tranquility in its busy surroundings, a garden and an optical glass façade are placed on the street side of the house, thus creating an oasis where residents could still make out the movements of people and traffic beyond the walls. The garden is visible from all rooms, and the serene soundless scenery of the passing cars and trams imparts richness to life in the house.


Weighing 13 tons, the façade employed some 6,000 pure-glass blocks (50mm x 235mm x 50mm). The pure-glass blocks, with their large mass-per-unit area, effectively shut out sound. Translucent or transparent depending on light conditions, the wall also animates the street and allows light and air to pass through the enclosed courtyard, enabling the creation of an open, clearly articulated garden that admits the city scenery.


To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass. The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass and high dimensional accuracy. Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities — a welcomed effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space.


At two-storey-high, the 8.6m x 8.6m wall was too tall to support itself, so the blocks had to be bolted together, strung together by stainless steel. Such a structure would be vulnerable to lateral stress, however, so along with the glass blocks, stainless steel flat bars (40mm x 4mm) were also strung at 10cm intervals. The flat bar is seated within the 50mm-thick glass block to render it invisible, and thus a uniform 6mm sealing joint between the glass blocks was achieved. The result — a transparent façade when seen from either the garden or the street. The façade appears like a waterfall flowing downward, scattering light and filling the air with freshness.


Sunlight from the east, refracting through the glass, creates beautiful light patterns. As light filters through the glass, it creates dancing patterns across the walls and over a group of maple, ash and holly trees.


Filtered light through the garden trees flickers on the living room floor, and a super lightweight curtain of sputter-coated metal dances in the wind.


The curtain is the only thing that separates the garden from the open living room located just behind it. This curtain folds back to reveal a second glass-block wall at the back of the room, which lines the edge of a central staircase.


The garden is raised up to the second floor to make room for a garage on street level. Residents are faced with the staircase upon first entering the house. A pool which acts as a water-basin skylight is positioned immediately above and projects more light patterns onto the entrance floor, which are made more beautiful when the rain strikes.


A split-level second garden is located at the back of the house, while the children's rooms occupy the top floor, a dining room and kitchen are on the first floor and a hobby room, Japanese room and extra bedroom can be found on the ground floor.

Tubs

Expresion Transversal

Location: Barcelona, Spain
Interior Designer: Susanna Cots

Erin Fetherston's Loft

Article: APT with LSD: Erin Fetherston
Magazine: Vogue

Fashion designer (and former Fashion Funder) Erin Fetherston moved to New York in 2007 and immediately launched the search for a new space that possessed the same old-world charm as her apartment in France. After looking for more than a year (“It was so much harder than I had expected,” she says), she finally found the perfect spot: a recently converted loft in Tribeca with high-ceilings and massive windows that overlook the Hudson River. She took to the task of decorating immediately—a process greatly slowed by the fact that it took several months for her beloved antique and vintage furniture to make the slow boat trip across the ocean. “I spent a lot of time in this big apartment with almost no furniture,” she says with a laugh. But, for Fetherston, it was well worth the wait. “I see it as a reflection of my creative universe,” she says. “It’s romantic and chic, but clean and modern.”



When the elevator doors open into Fetherston’s apartment, guests find themselves merrily deposited in the main entrance to the loft. “The doors actually came with the apartment, which was shocking,” she says, “because I would have picked them out for myself!” On the left, a pile of freshly cut wood is ready for the fireplace (“It definitely got a lot of use this winter,” she says) and the chandelier overhead is from her Paris apartment. While she bought her couches at ABC Home in New York, Fetherston picked up her Bergère-style chairs at an auction in Paris and shipped them across the Atlantic Ocean. “If you don’t speak the language well, those auctions can be very stressful,” she says. “But if you’re sharp, you can get amazing pieces.”



“This is the room I live in the most,” says Fetherston of her expansive living room, complete with soaring ceilings and oversize windows. “I wanted to balance the forties French vibe I had in my old apartment with pieces that were more modern.”



On the nesting tables in the living room (found buried at a flea market in Napa Valley), Fetherston piles vintage children’s books as decor. “I loved the old, washed-out colors of the covers.”



“I like everything to be a little magical, a little whimsical,” the designer says. “So I covered this Holly Hunt candle chandelier with some vintage silk roses. The whole thing runs on electricity, but some people think they are real candles and ask if I climbed up on my table to light each one.”



“Entertaining is something I really enjoy, but I want everyone to feel comfortable,” she says of her gray granite dining table and eighteenth-century chairs. She had the chairs re-covered in three different fabrics—including burlap—to make them look and feel more casual.



“What’s really beautiful about this is what is inside,” she says. “It’s a minibar of tiny crystal bottles and glasses.” The rose resting on the top is a memento from a set built by designer Ali Gallagher for one of Fetherston’s runway shows in 2008.

Kids' Bedroom Decor

Article: Decorating Ideas for Children's Bedrooms
Magazine: Homelife

Corum Residence

Location: Pella, Iowa, USA
Designer: Substance Architecture

This modest, single family residence on a four acre site was designed for a family looking to "downsize" their domestic lives. Playing on dimensions to create a contemporary home, the resulting home expresses itself and gestures beyond - to the rural Iowa landscape. The elemental design consists of a galvanized metal clad "tube" gently resting on a cast-in-place concrete "plinth" and pointed toward the view. The home's simple form and and materials reference agricultural buildings prevalent in the central United States.

The more public "living" spaces have direct access to the balcony, providing round-the-clock access to breathtaking views. Nestled at the other end, the private "bed and bath" functions are sequestered deep within the metal-clad wedge and concrete plinth. Internally, the home utilizes a system of maple and acrylic shelving, an open-riser stair, and a fireplace mass to vertically organize the section and link its three levels.













When Mike and Jaxine Corum decided to build a house, they were not interested in quantity of space, unlike so many suburban home owners today, but in quality. Breaking with the norm did not come easily. "Sometimes I would look at an aspect of the [proposed] design and think that we could have had a few more rooms instead," recalls Mike Corum. While sacrificing floor space, they got an elegantly organized, striking home, the likes of which Pella (Iowa) has never seen.

Set on a hillside in a new but mostly undeveloped subdivision four miles west of town, directly across the street from the only other house in the area, a neat Colonial, the Corum Residence is a single, monumental volume focused on a bucolic view of a small pond and a copse of windblown shrubbery. This single-volume strategy offered several advantages, says principal-in-charge Paul Mankins of Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck, Des Moines: "Part of the reason was cost, but we also wanted to design a building that reflected the utilitarian structures you see around Iowa." Those structures—barns, warehouses, and cone-capped grain elevators—have stark geometries that stand out on the gently rolling prairie, but their relationship to the Corum Residence might not be apparent to the casual observer.

To fit the desired program comfortably into the funnel-shaped volume, Mankins approached the design with a rationalist's eye. The width of the building derives from the minimum size needed for a two-car garage that occupies the north end of the building. Inside, discrete functions carefully unfold along a centerline, uniting small spaces into a greater whole.

The interior seems bigger than it is. Inset floor-to-ceiling side windows line the kitchen and dining area, keeping the space from feeling narrow. The monumentality of the volume also contributes to a sense of spaciousness: The looming presence of the large funnel-end makes the intimate inner rooms seem as though they are surrounded by much larger spaces, when in fact the entire house is only 2,200 square feet.

The funnel works differently at its southern end, where it culminates in a full-height space 26-feet square; a monumental window wall splits the area into a living room and an exterior balcony. The balcony, which extends to the very end of the giant tube, is a dramatic and imposing presence. This is not necessarily a negative: Standing at the open funnel-end is an exhilarating experience. However, the full-height living room on the other side of the glass is less successful; the tall, narrow, open-ended volume gives the living room the feeling of a hallway or atrium, a space to move through rather than settle in.

The Corum house is a bold attempt to introduce a strong exterior geometry into a gentle landscape and to take full advantage of a small interior space. Despite a few tenuous aspects, the house works, providing the owners with a small home that feels dramatic and spacious. Pella is a conservative place, especially when it comes to maintaining the town's public image, but since the Corums have moved in, they have had a steady trickle of visitors. "Everyone wants to see it," says Jaxine. "And once they come inside, they understand."