All our designs are based on the principles that the architecture must ‘fit’ the lives of the people in the building, now and in the future, and ‘flow’ effortlessly into the landscape. Both are challenging when working within the constraints of existing buildings.

The Case Study House Program in Southern California was sponsored by The Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 to 1966 with the purpose of reimagining the nature of post-war homes in America.  The prototype houses were designed by many of the leading architects of the day including Charles & Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood and Richard Neutra.  The atmospheric photographs by Julius Schulman, especially that of the Stahl House (Case Study #22) have become as iconic as the architecture.

 

The houses are a departure from the cellular pre-war construction embracing the new technologies of glass and steel.  Importantly they all explore the idea of a more open-plan arrangement of rooms that flow into each other and then on to the garden of which the house is a part. This idea, first developed by the earlier American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright in buildings such as the Robie house (1907) and then the amazing Fallingwater (1939).

 

This idea that the building and landscape are interlocked is key and a theme that is important in our work. When we designed Muswell Avenue with garden designer Manoj Malde, we looked at the work of Richard Neutra who seemed to pull the garden up to the house and in some cases within, rather than the usual arrangement of pushing the garden away to create the house and patio.  Neutra’s Singelton House (1959) blurs the boundary between inside and out by wrapping a reflective pool around the living area.  In the same way we placed a lily pool immediately adjacent to the house and the patio further down the garden encouraging everyone to flow out of the house and on into the landscape. The reflections off the pools dapple the ceiling with light, bringing that little bit of LA living to a Victorian House in North London.