When I was looking for property in Venice, I knew that I wanted to do something creative.
I knew that I wanted to build or design something of my own, and I had this very lofty and ambitious
goal of finding the single most spectacular property in all of Venice, and I thought you
know dream big why not? About three weeks into my hunting process, my real estate agent called
and said look why don't you just meet me over at the next property we're going to look at
and they opened the gates to the property and I heard angels singing, it had a beautiful
energy and soul to it, I knew the minute the gates opened that this was my place.
I think the first thing I told Tom when he agreed to do the project was that I didn't want the
typical Olson Kundig house, thankfully he has a good sense of humour and he's a very humble man.
I had never met Gillian prior to her interviewing me for this project.
She had some intuition on this particular property that I found poetic.
I could tell immediately it was going to be a terrific project.
One of the main agendas was this house, this residence,
it was more about the garden than it was about the architecture, but it also had to meet a program.
The program was there were a couple of bedrooms, there was a yoga studio,
a living, dining, kitchen area and how those parts and pieces manipulated around the garden
so that the garden became the room, rather than the room became the garden.
Anytime you're asked to do a project that there's a blurred line between
the interior and the exterior in a paradise climate like Los Angeles, as an architect
you're employing a number of techniques that treat the building like layers of clothing.
You're able to sort of open the building, or close the building, manipulate how you enter and exit,
all sorts of choreographing that can happen between that inside and outside. How you
manipulate those rooms on a site, especially as the sun goes through the sky, filters through
the high trees, is ultimately the magic, the spirit of the experience of a garden house.
The beautiful thing about living in Venice is the quality of light. There's just no place in the
world that has this particular light. It's magical from the moment the sun rises until it sets.
One of my favorite things in the house is an installation that is
a kinetic sculpture, it's called a Gamelatron.
it's designed by a very, very good friend of mine named Aaron Taylor Kuffner,
he goes to Java, he helps forge the gongs from the fire, they bring them back to his
studio in Brooklyn and then he machines every single part that you see on it.
He composes all the music on site and you just push a button and you have this beautiful kinetic
sound bath of all these gorgeous Indonesian gongs. It's very important, it sets the tone, it's a
meditation, it can be a meditation and it sets the tone for how the rest of it hopefully will go.
The palette of the house was as modest and simple as possible.
There's an intentional proportional system, a material system,
that's modest and background to the main agenda which is this garden.
The windows are thin metal which picks up the horizon lines of the garden.
The walls are a white stucco that's intended to reflect that sunlight as it goes to the sky
and then the roof planes and a lot of the colour is actually dark. A dark colour next to a garden
lets the colour of the garden pop because you're picking up the shadows of the garden.
I get asked a lot what's my favorite part of a project and this one I think it's that the house
disappears into the garden. You recognise that there were architects involved that cared about
what they did, but that's almost secondary to just not even knowing the house exists, that you flow
naturally from inside to outside, either visually or actually, it just becomes part of the garden.
I actually like to think of this as a house set inside a garden
this house is a deconstructed geometry, each shape is a container for a different purpose.
It was so fantastic because it really dives into the psychological and emotional benefits
of living with less, of not being a slave to your possessions and I really didn't want to
build a house that had anything extra and I think that we definitely achieved that.