"You hear visitors in the entry vestibule before you see them and when friends come for dinner, they meet for cocktails in a lounge with low gray furniture — the ceilings are just under seven feet high — until they eventually wander past an enclosed, terrariumlike indoor garden to the magenta dining room beyond. Nearby, there’s a purple-carpeted, textured-concrete closet, intended only for playing chess, accessible via a secret door."
From
"In Mexico City, a Futuristic House With a Secret Chess Room/The architect Fernando Romero has pushed what was once a generic midcentury home as far as it can go" (NYT gift link)(with lots of photos of very unusual rooms).
Seems like the set for a horror movie, but to each his own.
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23 comments:
It's cool-looking, but I would not want to live there. There is nothing homey about it.
Seven-foot ceilings are, to me, a very comfortable height, especially in bedrooms.
It's great as an art piece, but it will take superhuman effort to keep it looking as shiny and clean as it is in these pictures. Let's revisit it in 5 years, and see how it's holding up.
You may notice that the entry door pivots rather than being on hinges. That seems to be a current trend in high-end homes and presents unique challenges, not the least of which is sealing from the elements.
If Phillip Glass and Frank Gehry had a child...
Hearing visitors before you see them puts me in mind of the house outside Houston that we sold last year before setting out on our travels. When we first bought that house, its open plan appealed to my husband because our previous house, in Pennsylvania, was "chopped up" - every room entered via a doorway no more than twice the width of a standard door - presumably because Pennsylvania has real winters and more enclosed rooms hold heat better.
For the eight years we lived in our Texas house, we learned the downsides of open-plan architecture: whatever the kids were doing upstairs (or if we had friends over downstairs), sound traveled everywhere. We couldn't regulate the temperature, even with separate air conditioners for upstairs and downstairs. Transitions in flooring and wall color were very difficult to accomplish gracefully, design-wise, because the rooms flowed into one another, so it was hard to set a different tone from room to room.
That said, I do like secret rooms! Quite a few Texas houses in our area had rooms hidden behind built-in bookcases and such - we toured some when house-hunting. I presume they were mostly for putting your gun safe in, but I never asked
Kitchen: awful
Study: awful
Chairs: awful
Recently toured the Dana-Thomas house in Springfield IL designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Fantastic stained glass windows. Mostly low ceilings. All custom furniture. Didn’t seem invitingly livable. Seems like some architecture is more for arts sake than living.
It reminded me more of a late-60s / early-70s sci-fi movie set than a horror film. I kept expecting Ed Bishop and the cast of UFO to appear in full unitard regalia.
I was curious so I caved and created an account with NYT
I feel yucky,
tho my password is F the NYT.
Depressing. The only room with a tab bit of life is the green circle window hot tub plant room. The rest is boring hyper 60's modern.
The library was marginally okay, but doesn't a library need a comfortable chair to read in......The magenta (?) floor color probably helps to hide the blood stains if you decide to butcher one of your guests in order to sell his body parts so parts of the styling serves a practical purpose.
crica sometime in the 1990's - a BF and I (at his urging) waiting until dark and hiked up a steep hill and crawled thru a small open window - into this house above I-70. We were not there to harm anything - we just wanted to check it out.
The home was abandoned at the time. Inside, Someone had erected straight wall metal studs (no drywall) in what looked like an attempt to add separation to the open areas. There was a crummy stainless steel kitchen sink sitting on the floor.
Many glass windows were broken. The views are amazing. East to the city - west to the mountains.
The new owners paid only 1.5 mil and have restored it.
The inner stairway railing is still the same.
I like it -especially the curved glass windows. The kitchen is a disappointment, seems to closed off from the rest of the space. Not utilizing curved bookcases in the "library" seems like a huge miss. I might make some different color choices.
Way too Mod, plastic, and antiseptic for my taste. I prefer older and wood.
I loathe those resin floors.
Yes. The resin floors would be a non-stop assault on vision.
Long ago I rented a mansion in Carmel Valley ( just I lad from the caramel where Clint was mayor) for a multifamily reunion. On the first floor ( as the French would say) in the middle of the Great Room there was a pillar.
About a meter diameter, three meters tall with a top that flared out to host a number of fake decorative plants.
This pillar was marbled lavender.
The rest of the place was similarly bizarre.
7 foot ceilings suck. It's like living in your parents' basement. Why would anyone pay money for this?
And resin floors are very hard on your feet, ankles and knees.
The shapes are interesting but the colors are disturbing. I probably would have liked it better before the update.
It was a bit like a gnome's house, one of those garden items. Only it was massively enlarged and you could get inside. It's the mostly the furniture that made me feel that way but also something about a space that seemed designed for a slightly different body - human shaped but different. Like a gnome.
The Times and I have very different ideas of what a "generic midcentury home" looks like. Even before Romero, the house was "pushed as far as it would go" from what I assumed a typical 1960s home would be.
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