- Welcome back to Houzz TV live, I'm Rick Spence.
And with me today is Nils Finne with Finne Architects
in Seattle, Washington.
Doing amazing projects all over the world.
You've won so many awards on Houzz.
You've been in business nearly 30 years.
And today we're gonna talk about this amazing project
in Venice, California.
So thank you for joining us Nils.
- [Nils] I'm very happy to be here.
- This is a absolutely beautiful design,
and I thought maybe we could start
with the outside of the home,
and kinda work our way in.
So tell me about how you sited the home,
and what some of the challenges were in this space.
It doesn't look like a massive lot.
I imagine the lots are a little smaller in that area.
And what was the strategy there?
- Most of the lots in Venice are very, very small.
Some of them are only 2, 3000 square feet.
My client was lucky enough to find 11,000 square feet or so,
but it's a long rectangle.
I kind of massed most of the house along the easterly edge.
So I kind of made the house long and linear.
And that left me with a garden space on the west side
that literally went the entire depth of the lot.
The living area projects into the garden space,
and then there's a pool as well
that's part of that garden.
But the idea of turning the house,
and kind of making it linear,
and then taking advantage of the full depth of the lot,
I think was a bit unusual,
and my clients really loved the idea.
- Tell me a little bit about
when you design a home like this,
it's a modern home,
but it has a little bit of Craftsmanesque detail to it.
Tell me about how you combined kind of those two things
and made it a part of this home, and materials in general.
- Well you're touching on a subject very dear to my heart.
I have been striving to create
what I call "Crafted Modernism" for many, many years.
And the philosophy is that modern architecture
has gotten a bad rap.
That it's cheap,
that it's thin,
that it's poorly detailed,
that it falls apart,
that it doesn't have
that kind of material richness and craft
that more traditional homes have,
and my campaign, if you will,
or my response to that argument,
is that the modern architecture that I'm trying to achieve
uses modern forms,
but with a richer palette of materials,
and with a sense of detailing and craft,
that brings back the positive elements
of what people feel about older homes,
and, hey, let's face it, we're in the 21st century,
the idea of making a house that looks like something
that was created 100, 200 years ago, seems kind of silly.
And so let's make an architecture of today.
Let's make something that speaks to our modern times,
but then bring in the element
of craft, and material, and detail,
that allows that house to really endure,
and not look cheap and kind of ragged
after just a few years.
This interesting brick that we have,
you can see the brick as you approach the house,
it's kind of an accent wall there by front entry,
and then you can see it again in the fireplace.
That brick is a very unique brick.
That's called the Kolumba brick,
and it was designed by a Swiss architect
named Peter Zumthor,
who is regarded as one of the world's leading architects.
He's currently working on a massive redesign of LACMA,
the LA County Museum in Los Angeles.
So each Kolumba brick has this beautiful linearity,
and then the firing of the clay body is wonderful,
it has a very organic feel,
and there's a tremendous amount of color variation.
Kolumba brick is manufactured in Denmark.
We shipped it to Los Angeles.
As far as I know,
I don't think there are any other uses of this brick
in Los Angeles.
There may be by now,
but at the time we did the house,
I think it was one of the first.
- [Rick] Tell me a little bit about that roofline.
- I believe that roof forms are a tremendous possibility
of bringing kind of a sculptural presence to a house.
Someone once called the roof "the fifth facade,"
because you have north, south, east, and west,
and then the roof, that's number five (laughs).
Now, you know,
it may be that only people flying by air, in airplanes,
or drones, or maybe God, see that,
but it is a facade,
and it does have potential of animating spaces inside
in a very wonderful, remarkable way.
And it brings light into houses in very interesting ways,
by staggering roofs and by manipulating light.
The roof forms on the Venice house are kind of animated.
The main bedroom wing and roof has kind of a folded feeling.
And then the roof over the main living space is a,
and get ready for this,
it's a technical term,
it's a hyperbolic paraboloid.
There's two different slopes that are tied together
by this overall roof shape,
and when you're inside,
you see this gentle curvature
to the way the beams work inside there,
and it's all done with straight beams.
So anyway, that living room roof
is kind of the piece de resistance, the main meal,
and then the bedroom wing roof
is kind of the appetizer, or the intro, if you will.
- This home is simply breathtaking. So much to look at here.
So let's take a look at some of the main living areas.
The front door is beautiful.
It's definitely a grand gesture
when you first enter the home.
- The overall idea is the front door is a handshake.
The house is shaking your hand and saying hello to you.
And so I think,
as with anyone, when you're first meeting them,
that first handshake is important.
It's five feet wide by eight feet high
on this offset pivot hinge,
which allows it to open very smoothly back and forth,
because the weight of the door is not hanging on hinges,
it's hanging on this pivot,
which supports it at the top and the bottom.
You can open it back and forth with your finger.
It's really quite wonderful.
- [Rick] Now the stairs you have, you have this combination
of that beautiful wood with the metal,
how important was it to have that sculptural wood element
to give it a little bit of that Modernist Craftsmen,
what were you calling it?
- Yeah, Crafted Modernism.
- Crafted Modernism, got it. Okay. I'll remember that now.
- Yeah, we'll get you hooked on Crafted Modernism.
- I'm already hooked.
- Okay.
Well, to answer your question,
of course, the stair is extremely important.
It's the first thing you see as you come in.
Clearly it's leading up
to the more private area of the house,
so many people enter the house, and they see it,
but don't use it (laughs),
but it adds a very sculptural presence to that entry space.
And as you noted,
there is a fairly intense amount of detailing
to the kind of floating wood treads,
and then the handrail itself,
that is a piece of Sapele wood,
which is a beautiful mahogany-type wood,
and it's been shaped,
it's been molded into a kind of a organic shape
that I use on many of my projects,
that's not just a round handrail,
it's actually an asymmetrical shape
that fits your hand very beautifully.
So yeah,
I think it kind of sets the tone for that entire space.
So that's kind of the introduction to the house.
One of the clients loves to play the piano,
and it's a great space for that piano.
Kind of around the corner there's also a powder room there,
so you can take care of all the business as you come in.
And then, as you're standing in that front entry space,
you kind of turn a little bit to the left,
and then you can see all the way down to the fireplace.
You can see through the entire kind of living area
of the house,
the dining room, and the living room beyond that.
And then of course,
how that portion of the house opens up to the pool,
and so on.
- [Rick] It is breathtaking
when you're in the fireplace area,
looking back towards the pool and the dining area,
and you see that wood,
it also has almost a musical feeling to it.
- Yeah. I think the idea of progression,
you can think of musical scales,
when you're playing the scales, and so on,
that there is a musical aspect
to this idea of an architectural progression.
And then as you pointed out, you see the pool on the left,
the doors to the pool are a story unto themselves,
because each door panel is 10 feet wide and eight feet high,
and they both slide back.
So when you slide those doors back,
the opening to the pool is 20 feet wide by eight feet high.
And those doors were made here in Seattle,
by a company I've used for many years
named Quantum Windows & Doors,
and they are experts at making these enormous wood doors.
- [Rick] And they operate just as nice as the front door,
beautiful-
- They do. - Smooth, just like butter.
- They do. They have what we call lift slide technology,
where you take this handle,
and you turn it up,
and it lifts the whole door up off the track.
And then you can slide that door back and forth
with your finger.
That's how that's how easily they move.
- [Rick] Tell me about the kitchen now.
And I really love the offset that you did here,
having the sink off to one side,
and then the glass countertop off to the other.
- Well, the kitchen island
is designed as a piece of sculpture,
this kind of block, if you will, of the engineered quartz,
so that the quartz comes to the front edge
and it just turns down,
so you read the whole thing as a shape.
That shape, that block, is elevated off the floor 10 inches,
and it kind of floats at the ends.
It's cantilevered out.
So, I think that in a large kitchen, as this one is,
the opportunity is there
to make that island really kind of an accent piece,
if you will.
The cabinets and all the workspaces
all kind of surround that island.
And that is a piece of low-iron cast glass
from a company in Seattle named Glassworks
that we use often in our projects.
And then I set that counter down
at 30 inches above the floor
so that you could have a chair there,
and sit and have your breakfast,
or talk to the cooks, and so on and so forth.
I personally think that there is something comfortable,
reassuring, and stable, if you will,
about sitting in a chair with your feet on the floor,
as opposed to dangling your feet on one of these bar stools.
You have a few glasses of wine,
and you start to kinda teeter,
whereas if you're in a good chair,
you know you're on the ground,
you're not gonna go anywhere.
- And if you fall, you're closer to the floor.
So you're fine.
- Exactly (laughs). Exactly.
- [Rick] Tell me more about the lighting,
what you did to kind of help them be even better cooks.
- The light fixture over the island,
we made that fixture
with a company that I use a lot here in Seattle
named Landbridge Lighting.
Clearly, for a very sculptural Island like that,
you start looking at off-the-shelf light fixtures,
and you just kind of go through hundreds,
and nothing quite works.
So I designed this piece,
and the steel detailing kind of picks up on
the other steel detailing we have in the house.
And of course,
the shape and the length of it
is very closely tailored to our particular island.
And then in terms of the rest of the kitchen,
you'll notice on the back work counter
that the backsplash is all glass.
A translucent glass, which brings in the light,
but doesn't allow the view of kind of a side yard there
that you don't really want to look out.
And then when you're cooking,
glass is a great surface for cleaning,
it's completely smooth,
there's no grout lines to worry about getting dirty,
and so on.
So the glass is fantastic in that direction.
And then the last thing is that two of those windows open,
so that if you have the large sliding doors
towards the pool open, and those windows open,
you get an incredible cross draft right through the house,
through the kitchen area, which is very, very useful.
- What a beautiful peaceful place to just hang out.
- [Nils] You know, as it happened,
of course, my clients have been hunkered down,
because of the pandemic,
they've been in the house.
And I did get an e-mail from them,
sequestered in place there for a couple of months,
and they said, "You know, Nils, we are loving it. (laughs)
We just get to stay in this house."
And I said, "Yeah, it looks pretty nice."
- It sounds like an amazing collaborative effort.
And I can just see it in your smile
when you talk about the home,
what pleasure you get,
knowing how happy they are in the home.
And congratulations on that. Just beautiful.
And I hope to see more of your projects in the future.
Come see you in person,
do something once the pandemic allows us to travel
a little bit more.
- Well, thank you, Rick.
And it's been a lot of fun doing this with you.
So I very much appreciate this opportunity.
- Absolutely. We'll be in touch.
- Okay. Thank you.
- See you. Bye bye.