Lund Humphries’ Open House - Dream Houses
In honour of the annual Open House Festival which begins tomorrow, 8 September 2022, Lund Humphries is excited to 'open the doors' of some of the most beautiful and inspiring houses by opening the covers of our architecture books! Commissioning Editor for Architecture, Val Rose, explores a selection of these dream houses....
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Several of the practices featured in our monographs specialise in the design of single residential buildings, which are carefully tailored to their specific site and owner's needs. Stepping inside each of these projects reveals how successful collaborations with enlightened clients can result in extraordinary, uplifting and inspiring spaces.
Creek House, Cornwall by Seth Stein Architects.
The Creek House in Cornwall, for which Seth Stein recently won a RIBA National Award and RIBA South West Regional Award, echoes a previous award-winning bespoke house in the Southwest region, Pencalenick house. These houses share a sculptural, light-filled quality, combined with a strong sense of place. They curve around the contours of a wooded ridge, making the most of their enviable vantage over the sea, the warm local stone and timber exquisitely detailed and constructed by master craftsmen.
Greenways in Coombe Park, Kingston, Nick Eldridge Architects.
Featured in Nick Eldridge: Unique Houses.
What does an architect’s dream home look like? With its sinuous curves and sculptural modernist elegance, it is no surprise that producers of the recent Netflix series The Sandman selected Nick Eldridge’s Manser Medal winning house, Greenways in Coombe Park, Kingston, as the house that fictional architect Hector created in the realm of dreams for his partner Lyta. This ambitious and striking landmark home sensitively responds to the surrounding grounds, including a mature oak tree which accounts for the curving exteriors and the suggestion of a floating structure with its cantilevered curved ends. The exterior curves are complemented in the entrance rotunda, the grand spiral staircase and the crafted furniture curving around the fireplace.
Greenways in Coombe Park, Kingston, Nick Eldridge Architects.
Featured in Nick Eldridge: Unique Houses. Photo: Michael Sinclair.
"Living in Greenways is like living outdoors….suspended in space and time in a peaceful, monastic case. Greenways is an antidote to today’s world in the sense that it offers space, bareness, silence, curves and no straight lines; fluidity.
Having witnessed the blue screen installation in our front garden, I was stunned to see that, thanks to impressive CGI, our house was transported in to an imaginary world." ~ Owner of Greenways
Hannington Farm in Northamptonshire, designed by James Gorst Architects.
Formed as a careful arrangement of connected buildings, articulated with asymmetrical pitched roofs and dramatic freestanding chimneys, Hannington Farm in Northamptonshire, is a rural idyll. Winner of another RIBA national award, it was designed by James Gorst, an architect who also pushes the boundaries of modernist architecture by combining its clean lines with an understanding of the elegance of classical proportion and scale. In Hannington Farm, he incorporates a sensitive and sustainable use of local stone for the walls and roof shingles to create a fine new manor home in a modern vernacular style.
Richard Neutra, Wirin House, 1949, Los Feliz, CA, Restoration completed 2010.
Featured in Millennium Modern by Michael Boyd and Michael Webb. 
Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22, Pierre Koenig, Los Angeles, California, 1960.
Featured in John Pardey's book 20/20.
For many architects, their dream house exists on the West Coast of America, in the stream-lined elegance of the mid-century modern homes created by the likes of Paul Rudolph, Oscar Niemeyer, Richard Neutra and Craig Ellwood. Our recent publication, Millennium Modern, showcases several such remarkable houses and reveals how they can be sensitively renovated, set within complementary landscape, furnished and upgraded for luxurious 21st Century living. Another Neutra home, the Desert House in Palm Springs, was selected by John Pardey, himself a leading residential architect and winner of this year’s RIBA national awards, for inclusion in his fascinating volume, 20 Great Houses of the 20th Century, in which he expertly guides the reader around some of the greatest homes ever created.
For more info on all books mentioned above, click on the covers below...
