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Tag Archives: los angeles interior design

Dering Hall

30 Thursday May 2013

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architects, architecture, artisans, arts, Dering Hall, design, finest interior designers, furniture, home furnishings, interior design, interior design companies, interior design consultants, london interior design, los angeles interior design, new york interior designers

386178-Ralph_Pucci_International_Volubile

Y2DC is now proud to announce their inclusion on the Dering Hall online marketplace. Here you will find the finest interior designers, architects, artisans, and design galleries to showcase their work and sell new, high-end home furnishings and accessories.

At Dering Hall they are passionate about design and broadening the audience for the best the industry has to offer. Their ongoing mission is to assemble a community of the world’s leading creators in one place and to connect them with other designers and savvy, sophisticated consumers.

They provide a roster of top talent with permanent storefronts, where they present a curated assortment of products to highly engaged shoppers. These customers, in turn, gain access to unique pieces previously available only to select designer clients. It’s an entirely new approach to furnishing a home—and one that makes hunting for that perfect bespoke sideboard a dynamic and enjoyable experience.

Buyers can effortlessly browse Dering Hall’s storefronts, search product listings, or keep up to date on favorite designers with our innovative “Follow” function. They also offer special Featured Sales as well as a range of compelling and inspiring design content. Welcome to the world of Dering Hall, from the best designers in the world!

http://www.deringhall.com

Aaron

06 Thursday Dec 2012

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furniture, interior design, london interior design, los angeles interior design, style

AL_AaronBack-LTH-KO_356Inspired by Danish modern influences, the Aaron chair is sure to be a statement piece for any room. The solid walnut base cradling the contoured, comfy frame makes it breathtaking at every angle. With subtle curves and refined style, this accent can easily be paired with several different styles.

A+R Venice, CA

02 Wednesday May 2012

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architect mies van der, Eileen Floor Lamp, interior design consultants, los angeles interior design, Mies van der Rohe, Misewell's, Nud Collection, Pendant Light

Misewell’s Eileen Floor Lamp

Eileen is one elegant partner in any room. She cooly leans against a wall or corner by way of a steel base, aluminum neck and spun shade. Machined, stainless-steel fittings allow neck to smoothly pivot, while creating friction for shade height adjustability. Milwaukee-based Vincent and Paul Georgeson launched Misewell in 2008, and caught the attention of the design world–and us–when they took the Best New Designer Award at ICFF the next year. The brothers believe in furniture that is simple, functional and honest. They are committed to responsible manufacturing, creating long-lasting, high-quality furnishings with minimal environmental impact. Besides steel and aluminum, the Georgeson’s use American, mostly locally sourced maple and walnut.

Nud Pendant Light Cord

The details separate great from good design, said designer-architect Mies van der Rohe. With that in mind, Staffan Svensson considered the pedestrian light cord and holder and founded NUD Collection. He also gave designers Eva Angwald and Charlotte Falck carte blanch when it comes to colors. Transform a room in a snap. Comes with an E27 porcelain socket, white plastic ceiling cap and 118″ of textile cable. Approved for North American use.

Check out the rest of their collection in their Venice store.

A+R is at 1121-1 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291

T: 310 392 9128

A Look at Santa Monica’s Unique Hill House

30 Monday Apr 2012

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architecture, green architecture, Hill House, interior design, interior design companies, interior design consultants, los angeles architecture, los angeles interior design, luxury development, Santa Monica, Sustainable Architecture

Seated in Santa Monica, California’s Pacific Palisades, this house was advantageously planned to meet the restricted policy of the area. It also designed to promote safety and preserve the said landscape. The landscape of the area is one of the most important factors in selecting a house spot. Also it is made to take advantage of its volume considering its environmental effect.

This house is called the Hill House and it has three floors. It is built to create a more spacious and a friendly interior area. The central floor is where you can see the living room, kitchen and the dining room. It has a semi-private loft space above the main floor. The bedrooms are located in the ground floor.

The highlights of this house are sliding glass doors on the main floor and the skylight aperture. It is made of high quality materials such as concrete, steel and timber. Also it is covered with a special material that was colored to match the eucalyptus bark that is found in the place. Now, I am pretty sure that you are so excited to see the pictures that will justify my description of this Hill House. You may now look at the pictures below to fully see its features.

Hill House Front View 1

Looking at the front of this house can make you think of the secrets that can be revealed from the inside.

Hill House Front View 2

The role of the skylights in both the flat and sloped roofs added the typical distinction between the roof and its wall.

Hill House Exterior 1

The foundation of this house is nine 35-foot deep with the concrete piles.

Hill House Furniture

The lines and shape of this house complements with the arrangements of the chairs.

Hill House Furniture

Here is a glimpse of the simple dining room and kitchen.

Hill House Dining Room

The panoramic view is straightly seen from the dining room to the kitchen room.

Hill House Kitchen Room

You can see the area from the living room to the loft of this Hill House.

Hill House Interior 1

You may feel the freedom in exploring the different spots in this wide space of the house.

Hill House Bookshelves

Here is the loft where you can see their collections of reading materials that are perfectly arranged in these shelves.

Hill House Bedroom

You are now looking at the simple bedroom just found below the main floor.

Hill House Fixtures

Here is the sliding glass door in the main floor that emphasize the uniqueness of this house.

Hill House Kitchen Sink

The combination of white and silver color in this kitchen area stressed the cleanliness and neatness of this space.

Hill House Interior 2

For sure you can unwind here when you can see the landscape from the exterior.

Hill House Interior 3

The first rate furniture are excellently placed in its respective area.

Hill House Interior 4

This is the ideal area where you can sit down and read your favorite book.

Hill House Sketch Plan

This is the Sketch Plan of the Hill House.

Now we may say that the incredible shape of this house contains a very strong minimalist concept. The design of this house provides an opportunity to see the green view from the different parts of the house. Undeniably we are truly impressed on this Hill House which is made by Johnston Marklee. The designer is very creative and intelligent to come up with this kind of house.

You have witnessed how the designers wittingly planned where to put the different rooms in its respective place. The private areas of this house are the loft which is a studio and a bathroom in the basement. You can also see some California grasses that seem to form a blanket that covers the slope in the entire house. Thus we can say that if and only if we would have house design like this, our everyday life will be more peaceful and calm. Are you inspired to have a house design like this?

At Coyote House, every day is an Earth Day | LA at Home [LA Times]

22 Sunday Apr 2012

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architecture, Blackbird Architects, Environmental Design, green architecture, green design in LA, green materials, interior design, interior design consultants, LEED platinum homes, los angeles architecture, los angeles interior design

Oh, how far we’ve come from Earth Days past — when the phrase “green home” conjured images of straw-bale structures, when solar panels seemed like such an earnest novelty, when “LEED certified” hadn’t yet crept into public consciousness.

With Earth Day 2012 almost upon us, nearly 60,000 homes in the United States are in the process of being certified in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Education and Environmental Design program, according to Nate Kredich, the organization’s vice president of residential market development. Need more convincing proof of just how far we’ve come? Take a peek at the new home of architect Ken Radtkey and landscape architect Susan Van Atta.

The husband and wife’s three-bedroom house nestled into a Montecito hillside is dubbed the Coyote House, partly after the name of the couple’s street, partly after the howling critters in the area. Beyond its abundance of energy- and water-saving features, however, the house is notable for its utter normality: On the most basic level, it is simply a comfortable and beautiful family home.

Coyote House veranda“Designing sustainably was a given for us,” says Radtkey, founder of Blackbird Architects, a Santa Barbara firm with an emphasis on sustainable design. “But the most important goal was to make a great home.”

To that end, the house starts with a modern take on the veranda, right. A covered room overlooking the front garden has a sliding screen and front and back sets of glass pocket doors that can open to the outdoors or seal it off in various ways, depending on the season and weather.

A dozen highly flammable eucalyptus trees — by coincidence, cut down just months before the November 2008 Tea fire that swept through the region — were used to build the front door, kitchen table, bookcases, stairs and banister. Other materials used for interior appointments were sustainable too: Cabinets are bamboo, the floors are cork or salvaged stone, most of the walls unpainted plaster.

Coyote House living room
But the house does go beyond common green materials and approaches, the couple says, “fully engaging the site to reap an experiential quality of life.” (That’s Van Atta and Radtkey in the living area.)On the “mirador” above a second-floor bedroom, for example, solar panels configured as a pergola not only generate nearly all of the house’s electricity but also create a shady viewing deck. “We like to go up and sit on our porch swing and have drinks there,” Radtkey says.Coyote House roofThe mirador looks out onto the second floor’s green roof, right, which Van Atta planted with sedum and dudleya. “Instead of looking out across a hot roof, we have a lovely green area to entertain friends,” she says. Combined with rooms that are partially bermed into the hillside, the green roof further merges the house into the landscape.The main green roof is arced, so rainwater gently flows down to a lower rooftop meadow atop the garage, and from there to a gutter feeding a sophisticated series of cisterns. About 10,000 gallons of rainwater can be stored to irrigate the terraced garden, vegetable beds, fruit trees and a large lawn where the couple’s two sons play.The water-wise lawn consists of native grass seeded into a 14-inch-deep pan of sand. When it needs watering, irrigation flows across the surface of the underground pan, reaching roots through a wicking effect and minimizing evaporation.Coyote House day
“Honestly, a lawn at a LEED platinum home may not make sense, but there’s a quality-of-life issue that you have to consider,” Radtkey says. “Our sons love volleyball and badminton, and we wanted a lawn for them to play on.”Coyote House chickensAlso on the playful side: five chickens in the side yard next to the kitchen. The cackling hens, pictured at right with the couple’s son, Kellen, have become family pets that eat leftovers, supply rich manure for the compost pile and produce fresh eggs daily. Near the bottom of the driveway, a new beehive will produce fresh honey for toast as well as pollinators for the orchard.“It’s a pleasure to go out and pick the eggs, then make omelets for breakfast,” Van Atta says. “Right now we get about one-fifth of our food from the new garden and chickens, but we expect much more as the garden and orchard mature.”

Much of what the family has done can be seen as simultaneously looking forward and back, Radtkey says.

“A lot of the old-fashioned elements are common sense and have been around forever, like green roofs, proper orientation of the house for shade, using trees from the site to build furnishings and interior woodwork — not to mention having your own vegetables, fruit, fresh eggs and honey,” he says. “We take advantage of the latest thinking and newest materials in order to realize values people have had forever.”

— Barbara Thornburg

Landmark Houses: John Lautner’s Chemosphere

21 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by Y2DC© in Uncategorized

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architecture, celebrity home, Chemosphere, la homes, LA Interior design, los angeles architecture, los angeles interior design

By Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

When Benedikt Taschen, a globe-trotting publisher of stylish art books, and his then-wife first laid eyes on Chemosphere in 1997, the iconic Los Angeles house had seen better days.

The sleek, octagonal design, arguably the boldest work by the singular architect John Lautner, is considered a masterpiece of California Modernism and is beloved by cultists of midcentury design.

But the Taschens saw dirty, disco-era, wall-to-wall carpet on much of its 2,200 square feet, an old aluminum door, smudged windows and seven layers of paint on what was originally a gently austere, exposed brick wall.

Still, “it was love at first sight,” says the laconic German, wearing a red Muhammad Ali bathrobe as he shows off the place on a hazy morning. The backlist of Taschen’s company — from homoerotic nudes to the original Lutheran Bible — includes books on Modernist homes, the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman, the works of Richard Neutra and the Case Study houses. Some of the titles, along with dozens of art magazines, are scattered around the house and its unobtrusive furniture.

Today, the place is serene and airy, with a simple, light-wood openness that suggests midcentury Scandinavian crossed with a ski chalet, and views that are pure Southern California.

“I bought it right away — as fast as possible,” says Taschen.

Frank Escher, who was brought in as restoration architect, vividly remembers the place’s condition.

“I have to give Benedikt credit for seeing past the disrepair and sad state the house had fallen into,” he says. “It looked like a rundown motel. It had been rented out for 10 to 12 years; it was like the ultimate party house.”

In fact, during much of that decade, the place had been on the market. “It was for sale for so long,” says Taschen, “that it was even in a ‘Simpsons’ episode: a house with a for-sale sign.”

“There was no market for that house,” says Julie Jones, the Realtor in the sale, who had watched the place languish after she listed the house. “Everybody loved Spanish, and then shabby chic came in.” Midcentury houses “would sit and sit and sit — you couldn’t give ’em away. People would want to see the view, and that was about it.”

The fate seemed unjust for a structure the Encyclopedia Britannica had judged “the most modern home built in the world,” and which had appeared in Brian De Palma’s “Body Double.” It’s hard not to see the house, which sits on a 29-foot-high, 5-foot-wide concrete column over a long-considered-unbuildable Hollywood Hills site, as a hovering flying saucer or a prototype for the 23rd century architecture of “The Jetsons.”

But the 1960 house is very much a work of its time and place.

Alan Hess, an architectural historian and author of “The Architecture of John Lautner,” considers Chemosphere as perfect an expression of Southland culture as Greene & Greene’s Gamble House, Charles and Ray Eames’ Case Study house and the finest work of Neutra and R.M. Schindler.

Chemosphere was characteristically Los Angeles of that time because “it didn’t have to look like a house,” says Hess. “It was an architecture newly defined. It could take on its own brand-new shape. It displays the optimism of its time: that technology can be used to solve any problem, just as Century City and Googie’s,” the Lautner-designed Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, did. “The West would not be possible without technology: Water, electricity, everything that it took to overcome dryness and distance was dependent in some form on technology.”

Hess finds the house fascinating partly because it was built for a couple and their four children. “And yet whenever that house is used in the movies, it’s always a decadent bachelor pad,” Hess says. “You have the reality of Southern California life, and the image of Southern California life, summed up in one house.”

It’s not the only contradiction the place contains.

“From the outside it looks like a spaceship which you cannot enter,” Angelika Taschen says from Berlin, where she now lives. (The couple were finalizing a divorce at the time of this article’s publication.) “But if you go inside, it feels very cozy … very Zen and calming. Maybe because you are floating above the city, above reality in the sky. You feel disconnected from the planet and completely free and happy.”

The house is the product of a fortuitous union of architect, client, time and place. Leonard Malin was a young aerospace engineer in late-1950s L.A. whose father-in-law had just given him a plot north of Mulholland Drive, near Laurel Canyon. The land was leafy and overgrown, with extravagant views of the San Fernando Valley.

“My philosophy at the time was, most people work their whole lives to build their dream house,” Malin says from Arizona, where he’s constructing a new home. “Why not build it now, and pay for it for the rest of my life?” This was a time, during L.A.’s postwar expansion, when a middle-class client could build in the Hollywood Hills on a modest budget: Malin had $30,000 to spare.

The only catch: At roughly 45 degrees, the slope was all but unbuildable. The plot may have remained empty had Malin not approached Lautner, whose work he knew from a nearby house. Lautner, a brilliant but reputedly prickly man, sketched a bold vertical line, a cross, and a curve above it. “Draw it up,” he told his assistant Guy Zebert.

Though Lautner could appear imperious, a quality he may have learned from his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, he was also a deeply practical and hard-headed problem-solver. Lautner didn’t see the house as a flying saucer but as a sensible solution.

However counterintuitive the scheme, it was also one of very few imaginable that allowed the plot to be utilized. And because of a concrete pedestal, almost 20 feet in diameter, buried under the earth and supporting the post, the house has survived earthquakes and heavy rains. (The house is reached by a funicular.)

“What was great about Lautner,” Benedikt Taschen says, “is that he had this dualism about nature and the city.” He says the home’s northern edge, which contains the bedroom and his office, is very quiet. “It’s pure nature, with all kinds of animals: skunks, bobcats, coyotes, deer. They are not shy; you almost have nose prints on the window.

“And here,” Taschen says, walking toward the living room window that faces the Valley’s homes and skyscrapers along the 101 Freeway, “it’s all city.”

Taschen admires the bold dichotomies the architect worked with. “That’s the characteristic of great artists: They can make things simple.”

Hess points out that Lautner’s embrace of Modernist innovation and organic forms made him a more interesting architect but also contributed to his obscurity during much of his career. During the 1950s and ’60s, the starker, cooler Modernism of the Bauhaus and of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reigned in intellectual circles, especially in Europe and on the East Coast.

“Organic Modernism was just as modern in its use of materials,” Hess says, “but it had a different sense of space, which was flowing. The way a building was put together was like a tree or a flower or a cave — natural forms. Wright was one of the founders of that approach to Modernism, and Lautner brought it to Southern California.”

Even out-of-state critics and scholars who could appreciate the sharply angular California Modernism of midcentury didn’t know what to make of Lautner’s merging of the modern with natural forms. “So they ignored him,” says Hess, “or put him in the category of undisciplined, far-out, do-whatever-you-want California architecture.”

Escher, the preservation architect, considers Lautner “the missing link between the classic Modernism of the Case Study Houses and the work we now associate with Los Angeles — the more expressive, more sculptural forms. Frank Gehry has said that as a student, he considered Lautner to be a god.”

Unlike a lot of the more didactic and theory-driven homes of Modernists from Le Corbusier to Philip Johnson, it’s actually pleasant, most of the time, to live inside a Lautner. The homes don’t force their inhabitants into an ant farm’s existence the way some houses do. Le Corbusier called his homes “machines for living in,” and sometimes they felt that way, with their narrow hallways and rigidly prescribed paths.

Chemosphere is bisected by a central, exposed brick wall with a fireplace, abutted by subdued seating, in the middle. One side of the house is public, with a small kitchen and blended living and dining rooms including built-in couches below glass windows. The house’s private half includes a master bedroom with bathroom, small storage and laundry rooms, an office made of two children’s bedrooms, and an additional bathroom. Despite being more compact than many new single-family houses, it has most of the essential elements.

Angelika Taschen, a PhD in art history, knew the house from Shulman’s photos before she saw the real thing. She worried it might be difficult to live there.

She said that besides limiting her trips out of the house because of the funicular, living there didn’t alter her behavior. “Day-to-day life is really easy,” she says, often easier “than in a conventional home where the architect has not thought so much about every single detail.”

Lautner, despite his reputation as having a strong personality, worked hard to suit his clients and their inner lives.

Angelika describes the place as having a spiritual impact, almost like a church. “With this house he found and expressed this almost religious spirit with a perfect architectural language in general, but also in detail.”

Benedikt likens the house to an eagle’s nest. “You feel safe. It’s warm and human, not a cold place. You would not expect it from outside.”

The only consistent problem with the house, Taschen says, is that its technology often fails in subtle but frustrating ways. “Every day there is something not working,” he says. “The maintenance is 10 times higher than in any other building. Everything is much more complicated. To get cable or Internet, they have to come 10 times.

“It’s like having a vintage car — a ’55 Mercedes. More difficult. But they have a personality to them, ya?”

In Escher’s first meeting with Taschen, the restoration architect pointed out which pieces were original, which needed to be replaced, and which details deserved restoration. “He interrupted me in about half a minute and said in German, ‘Herr Escher, why don’t you do what you think is right?'”

For Escher, a native of Switzerland who loves the rational, structure-inspired work of Lautner, Neutra and the late Pierre Koenig, this was a gift from the gods. His firm, which he runs with partner Ravi GuneWardena, had been partly inspired by classic California Modernism, and here he could delve into a great Modernist’s original conception. (Escher wrote the first book on Lautner a few years after moving to Los Angeles in 1988, and oversees the John Lautner Archives.)

The architect describes the job as a philosophical challenge.

“I think the hardest thing was developing an intellectual strategy for how to deal with it,” Escher says, calling the task, “a combination of research into history and technology, and to some degree into Lautner’s psychology. You can’t be afraid of a house like that: You have to, in some cases, be kind of forceful.”

The forcefulness was balanced with the architects’ own “sensitive and careful” respect for Lautner’s intentions: The goal was to undo the damage previous tenants had exacted, and to simplify. The restoration team removed layers of paint, paneled the walls with the same shade of ash wood used for the original built-in couches and cabinets (some of which needed repair or restoration), and replaced the fixed-paneled windows with frameless glass.

“We wanted to make it as invisible and elegant as possible,” says Escher. “That’s something that’s important to all our projects: We don’t try to draw attention to a detail. It should disappear.” GuneWardena compares the process to “pruning a garden, to reveal the clarity of the structure.”

They also tried to match what they thought Lautner would have chosen if he’d had access to contemporary workmanship and a larger budget: The original drawings, for instance, described a floor of random broken slate, but the day’s technology would not allow the stone to be cut thinly enough to keep from destabilizing the house. Escher’s restoration ran the flagstone pattern inside and out, across the bridge that connects the front door to the funicular.

One of the biggest challenges was bringing art into the house, difficult when a home already exerts a bold personality.

“The Taschens originally wanted to have more period pieces,” Escher says. “But we didn’t want the house to be a museum of the 1960s.”

Today, Chemosphere is furnished sparely with clean-lined pieces including Eames chairs and a coffee table and an oval Florence Knoll dining room table. Taschen commissioned the suspended lamps of bent plexiglass strips by Cuban-born L.A. artist Jorge Pardo and the pastiche rug designed by German painter Albert Oehlen.

“These Lautner houses are like custom-made clothes,” Escher says, “so you really have to find the right tenant for them. Taschen was perfect for the house — he immediately grasped what the house was about, and he was entirely open to our ideas for the place, like ripping out the glass and commissioning pieces by artists.”

During the first few years the Taschens lived there, the house became locally famous for their parties, where photographer Bill Claxton and his model wife Peggy Moffett would carouse with porn stars, jazz musicians and director Billy Wilder.

These days, now that Taschen has an office in Hollywood and a bookstore in Beverly Hills, the place has reverted to being, mostly, a house for him and fiancee Lauren Wiener. He canceled plans for a guesthouse designed by Rem Koolhaas at Chemosphere’s base because he feared it would visually compete with the main house. His only major plan is to replace the bird-cage-like funicular with a more open one.

Taschen remembers going to a Beverly Hills open house where “a fashionable Hollywood film star” was selling his Neutra home. The young actor, in the publisher’s estimate, “had robbed the soul of the house. If you make tiny changes that don’t fit the integrity of the house, you destroy it. It’s like a movie where you add a scene of someone with a mobile phone in 1958, or a style of shirt or car that wouldn’t have existed until years later.

“It’s the responsibility of the owner to preserve it for future generations,” Taschen says, “because a house like this doesn’t belong to one or two people: It belongs to mankind.”

The Chemosphere restoration won an award from the Los Angeles Conservancy as well as the approval of its original tenant.

“Today there are materials that weren’t available then,” Malin says. “The place is much better than when I was in there — and it’s in keeping with Lautner’s vision.”

Taschen says it’s hard to get bored with the place — despite the rain this winter — since the enormous windows offer an expansive view on the world. “It’s like a wide-screen movie,” he says. “Always changing.”

home@latimes.com

This article is adapted from a piece that originally was published in The Times’ Home section on April 14, 2005.

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