Today AD brings you to Vail, Colorado to tour 165 Forest Avenue, a massive ultra-modern 
mansion nestled in the Rocky Mountains. From the linear fireplace in the living room, to Italian marble surfaces in the kitchen, each space in the home is an invigorating expression of timeless luxury. The interior elegance is only surpassed by the natural beauty seen through the home’s glass walls, which slide apart granting access to over 6,500 sq. ft. of heated exterior space.
Last year, architect Adam Richards revealed Nithurst Farm, his self-designed family home in the South Downs National Park. We’re pleased to share a new film exploring the far-reaching ideas and references that informed the convention-defying design of the house, as well as the intimate realities of daily life in the space, one year on.
Head of his namesake practice, based in Sussex and London, Richards oversees his studio’s work on residential and cultural projects that have most notably included the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft and the Gardens Learning Centre and Café at Walmer Castle. The handling of such buildings by ARA is one they define as an approach that seeks ‘to transform the deeper themes within its projects into engaging critical, spatial, social and structural propositions.’ This often translates to an engagement with the historical context of a site, so that an extension to a neo-classical Georgian townhouse in Notting Hill takes the form of an abstracted Greek temple, or a refurb to Arundel Lido is informed by a nearby Roman villa.
When it came to designing his own home, Richards had the freedom of a blank page. The brief was to create a new-build home for him and his family on a site at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by the woodlands and farmland of West Sussex. With creative freedom came the incorporation of seemingly disparate sources of inspiration, everything from the cinematic tactility of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 Soviet art house hit, Stalker, to the classical plan of Andrea Palladio’s Renaissance masterpiece, Villa Barbaro, and Robert Mangold’s 1970s minimalist work of geometric abstractions. The resulting building is one that plays with time, style and detail in surprising and unexpected ways, to appear as a “Roman ruin wrapped around a modern concrete house,” according to Richards.
A linear red-brick wall obscures the textured interiors and art-filled courtyard hidden inside McLean Quinlan’s low-rise Passivhaus home in Devon, UK. The energy-efficient dwelling, aptly named Devon Passivhaus, nestles into a sloped walled garden that was once owned by an old English country house that fell into a state of disrepair.
The overall design is simple and clean. An elegant brick front complements the brickwork of the old garden wall and a discrete front door opening references the gate in the garden wall. Further down, an oriel window breaks through, hinting at what is behind. Elsewhere, external surfaces are dark render, designed to recede visually in deference to the surrounding garden.
Tucked within, the house has a glass roofed courtyard at its centre, a winter garden flooding light into the interior. Spaces are arranged around this central core so the building functions both as a home and a gallery for our clients, great collectors of pottery and art, with spaces to display and curate.
Comfortable and serene interior spaces are punctuated with tactile and textured materials: reclaimed terracotta, rough sawn oak and clay plaster, to ensure that internally the building feels connected to the garden that inspired it.
Nestled on the rocky cliffs of Positano, this 170-sqm seafront villa offers two bedrooms with terraces and a beautiful view over the historic center of Positano, the Fornillo beach and Li Galli archipelago. Through a 400-step staircase, or via an elevator, one can easily reach the underlying sea. The villa also boasts a private parking spot, a unique and sought feature in Positano.
Positano is a cliffside village on southern Italy’s Amalfi Coast. It’s a well-known holiday destination with a pebble beachfront and steep, narrow streets lined with boutiques and cafes. Its Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta features a majolica-tiled dome and a 13th-century Byzantine icon of the Virgin Mary. The Sentiero degli Dei hiking trail links Positano to other coastal towns.
Stark-white exteriors elegantly enhanced by walls of glass and seven pyramid-shaped spires, inspired by the original owners’ travels to Egypt, define this visionary architectural design, not to mention the home’s name. Inside, the result is six soaring pyramidal vaulted ceilings of African mahogany with beautiful skylights at their peaks to welcome in the sun and starlit night skies, and a seventh creating and interior glasses atrium.
The architectural theme begins at the stone and stainless-steel front gate, topped with a white pyramid frame. Proceeding down the palm-lined and landscaped gravel drive, the ocean vista remains partially hidden from view while continuing up the granite walkway passing a grand cylindrical stone structure, reminiscent of the sugar mills that once sustained the island economy, and the cottages on the estate grounds.
Minimalist interiors perfectly harmonize with its Caribbean island backdrop by allowing nature to lead the design. The living and dining rooms are surrounded on three sides by sliding walls of glass inviting in the ocean views and sea breezes.
Expansive Amenities
The property includes three additional cottages for guests. The Reef House, the Beach House, and the Tamarind House are ultimately private and offer a total of five additional bedroom suites, spacious living areas, kitchens, and private patios overlooking the water. Outside an oasis of serenity awaits with covered terraces off the living roomand three bedrooms overlooking the pool, another terrace off the dining room for alfresco entertaining, grassy expanses, native plantings, swaying palm trees, some connected by hammocks, and the blue-tiled circular pool on a deck of silver-white granite from Sicily. Shoys Beach, arguably one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean is directly accessed from the property.
The night views of the twinkling lights of the historic town of Christiansted and the more distant landfall are enchanting. There are two additional stone sugar mill buildings on the property, complementing the one at the entry. Two are used for equipment storage and one as a beach changing room with facilities. Golf, tennis, and fine dining are nearby in the adjacent Buccaneer Resort. Yacht owners can moor their vessels next to Pyramid Point at the Green Cay Marina.
Country Life Magazine (July 26, 2020):
Chipping Campden is a town charmed by limestone. Its walls dance by the light of the dying day… Chipping Campden’s High Street is best viewed from the covered market of 1627, looking up towards the church tower. The houses are of a creamy local limestone. Walls are offset by grey-brown roof tiles and white woodwork, fronted by foxgloves, hydrangeas and a skirt of lawn.’
The High Street of Chipping Campden is described as ‘the best piece of townscape in Gloucestershire and arguably one of the best in England’, not by the agents, but by Nikolaus Pevsner himself.
The 18th-century, five-bedroom home is awash with period features, such as an oak staircase, fireplaces and exposed beams. The garden planted with hornbeam, yew and box hedging, as well as rose beds and herbaceous borders, leads through to the private parking area with three spaces.
The Cotswolds is a rural area of south central England covering parts of 6 counties, notably Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. Its rolling hills and grassland harbour thatched medieval villages, churches and stately homes built of distinctive local yellow limestone. The 102-mile Cotswold Way walking trail follows the Cotswold Edge escarpment from Bath in the south to Chipping Campden in the north.
Dating to the 1630’s this magnificent, historic property, ennobled by King Louis XIII in 1634, was discovered in 2006, entirely hidden beneath brambles and woodlands, by an intrepid local couple wanting to restore an important building of historical significance to the Béarn region.
Produced and Directed by: Michael Biondo, Dallas Bennett, and Michael Robison
Edited by: Dallas Bennett
Cinematography by: Michael Biondo
Architectural photographer and filmmaker Michael Biondo and creative reality capture duo Michael Robison and Dallas Bennett (aka MYND Workshop) have collaborated to create an episodic series of short visual tours of the Glass House, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
This video series seeks to create an ambient and intimate tour of Philip Johnson’s Glass House property in New Canaan, CT. These films are unique in the sense that they combine film and the use of point cloud technology to allow for a tectonic and artistic examination of the buildings in order to better understand the architecture and site design.
“Point clouds are an exceptional visual tool for understanding a space in ways which the human eye doesn’t typically allow,” said Michael Robison, co-founder and CEO of MYND Workshop. “The Glass House site could not be a more perfect subject to be experienced as a point cloud, providing insight into the complex relationships between the various structures and their careful placement throughout the dramatic landscape which defines the Glass House property.”
These films focus on a dialogue between Biondo’s carefully composed videography and MYND’s spectral point cloud visuals. Each video presents one of the different structures which comprise the Glass House property.
Biondo’s breathtaking video manages to capture those visceral experiences which one may come across when visiting the 49-acre property. These scenes offer the textures and light which define the sensual and emotional nature of Johnson’s work. In contrast, MYND Workshop’s animations speak to the layers and transparencies which Johnson often referred to when speaking about the design of the various buildings on the site, allowing for a design perspective that has never been seen before.
MYND Workshop’s medium of choice, the Point Cloud, may be best described as a 3D photograph which adds a spatial dimension to an otherwise 2D scene. The Brooklyn-based studio recognized early on the inherent beauty of the point clouds, exploring their creative potential by using them to create ethereal animations like those in the series.
This project was made possible by the generosity of Joanne and Stanley Marder.
About MYND Workshop
MYND Workshop is a Brooklyn based reality capture studio founded by Michael Robison and Dallas Bennett. Since 2015, they continue to implement a combination of 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry processes to document architecture, historic sites, film sets and artwork. MYND pushes the boundaries of these technologies by merging utility and creativity. Past projects have included Waldorf Astoria Hotel New York, Trinity Church Wall Street, World Trade Center Plaza, 9/11 Museum & Memorial, New York Stock Exchange, The Ford Foundation, The Brooklyn Navy Yard among many others.
About Michael Biondo
Michael Biondo is a New York and Connecticut-based photographer / filmmaker specializing in architecture and design. He studied Photography, Graphic Design, and Art History at the Pratt Institute where he earned a BFA. Recently Biondo contributed photographs to Rizzoli’s 2014 monograph, Allan Greenberg: Classical Architect; Design Book’s 50 U.S. Architects, published in 2015; and Inventive Minimalism, Monacelli Press, 2017. He co-authored and photographed Mid-Century Houses Today, Monacelli, 2015. His photographs have appeared in Architectural Digest, the Wall Street Journal, Architizer, Dwell, a+u Magazine and other publications.
Long Island. In 1912, she commissioned the Gilded Age architect William Adams Delano, of Delano & Aldrich, to build her a neoclassical studio on the grounds of the Whitney estate in Old Westbury.
When designer Richard Found discovered the dream plot on which to build his serene contemporary retreat overlooking a lake, he didn’t bet on what happened next. In the grounds stood a derelict 18th-century gamekeeper’s cottage, which was immediately spot-listed by Historic England. “It changed the whole dynamic of what I thought would be a straightforward new-build project, and became a far more arduous planning exercise.”…
House Proud is a series of videos created by the Telegraph which showcase some of Britain’s most idiosyncratic, quirky, unusual and unforgettable homes. A celebration of British eccentricity and imagination, in each film the owner gives us an intimate guided tour and tells us the story of their unique property.
