When I was looking for property in Venice, I knew that I wanted to do something creative. I knew that I wanted to build or design something  of my own, and I had this very lofty and ambitious goal of finding the single most spectacular property in all of Venice, and I thought you know dream big why not?

About three weeks into my hunting process, my real estate agent called and said look why don’t you just meet me over at the next property we’re going to look at, and they opened the gates to the property and I heard angels singing, it had a beautiful energy and soul to it, I knew the minute the gates opened that this was my place.

Collaborating With The Architect

I think the first thing I told Tom when he agreed to do the project was that I didn’t want the typical Olson Kundig house, thankfully he has a good sense of humor and he’s a very humble man.

I had never met Gillian prior to her interviewing me for this project. 
She had some intuition on this particular property that I found poetic. I could tell immediately it was  going to be a terrific project. 

One of the main agendas was this house, this residence, it was more about the garden than it was about the architecture, but it also had to meet a program. 

The program was that there were a couple of bedrooms, a yoga studio, a living, dining, kitchen area and how those parts and pieces were manipulated around the garden so that the garden became the room, rather than the room becoming the garden.

Anytime you’re asked to do a project that there’s a blurred line between the interior and the exterior in a paradise climate like Los Angeles, as an architect you’re employing a number of techniques that treat the building like layers of clothing. 

You’re able to sort of open the building, or close the building, manipulate how you enter and exit, all sorts of choreographing that can happen between that inside and outside.

How you manipulate those rooms on a site, especially as the sun goes through the sky, filters through the high trees, is ultimately the magic, the spirit of the experience of a garden house. 

The beautiful thing about living in Venice is the quality of light. There’s just no place in the world that has this particular light.
It’s magical, from the moment the sun rises until it sets.

One of my favorite things in the house is an installation that is a kinetic sculpture, it’s called a Gamelatron.

It’s designed by a very, very good friend of mine named Aaron Taylor Kuffner, he goes to Java, he helps forge the gongs from the fire, they bring them back to his studio in Brooklyn and then he machines every single part that you see on it. 

He composes all the music on site and you just push a button and you have this beautiful kinetic sound bath of all these gorgeous Indonesian gongs. 

It’s very important, it sets the tone, it’s a meditation, it can be a meditation and it sets the tone for how the rest of it hopefully will go.

The palette of the house was as modest and simple as possible. There’s an intentional proportional system, a material system, that’s modest and background to the main agenda which is this garden.

The windows are thin metal which picks up the horizon lines of the garden. The walls are a white stucco that’s intended to reflect that sunlight as it goes to the sky and then the roof planes and a lot of the color is actually dark.

A dark color next to a garden lets the color of the garden pop because you’re picking up the shadows of the garden.

I get asked a lot what’s my favorite part of a project and this one I think it’s that the house disappears into the garden.

You recognize that there were architects involved that cared about what they did, but that’s almost secondary to just not even knowing the house exists, that you flow naturally from inside to outside, either visually or actually, it just becomes part of the garden.  

I actually like to think of this as a house set inside a garden. This house is a deconstructed geometry, each shape is a container for a different purpose. 

It was so fantastic because it really dives into the psychological and emotional benefits of living with less, of not being a slave to your possessions and I really didn’t want to build a house that had anything extra and, I think that we definitely achieved that.


(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOrwjA9rUSU)