Tag Archives: Home Tours

English Country Houses: “Another Country” CEO Paul de Zwart’s ‘Hideaway’ Home In Dorset (Video)

See how since buying the house with his wife, managing director of creative agency Winkreative, Ariel Childs, 20 years ago, Paul de Zwart has transformed a 17th-century cottage into a refined take on the English country house idiom, with interiors that bear the mark of the couple’s desire for contemporary country living, where wellies are as at home as a cocktail shaker.

 London-based entrepreneur Paul de Zwart crystallized the concept for his fledgling furniture company, Another Country, while searching for some simple bedside tables and stools for his country house. “I realized there was a dearth of well-made, well-priced design with a modern craft heritage,” he says. His solution? An affordable line of pared-down pieces that are handmade in England from sustainable woods. “We’re going for timeless over trendy.”

Website

Italian Home Tours: Villa On Cliff In Sardinia (Video)

Lying on a cliff that descends towards the crystalline sea of Sardinia, in the town of Maracalagonis in the Province of Cagliari, The property is divided into six apartments on four terraced levels, each with a private panoramic terrace, and has a total internal surface area of 680 sqm.

Two splendid panoramic swimming pools dominate over the sea. The prestigious complex is currently divided into five suites that share some spaces and services including swimming pools and magnificent terraces, a heated whirlpool tub, three barbecues and three access doors from which you reach a staircase leading to the cliff below and to the sea. . Fascinating and suggestive, this extraordinary property on the coast of Sardinia offers all the desirable comforts, in a landscape of rare beauty that is an integral part of the villa itself.

Italian Home Video Tour: “Moltrasio On Lake Como”

In the heart of Moltrasio, a town on the shores of Lake Como, there is this intimate and luxurious estate with a panoramic view of the lake’s landscape for sale.

Moltrasio is a comune in the Province of Como in the Italian region Lombardy, located about 45 kilometres north of Milan and about 6 kilometres north of Como, near the border with Switzerland, on the western shore of Lake Como.

Home Tour Videos: Ultra-Modern Colorado Rocky Mountain Ski Mansion (AD)

Today AD brings you to Vail, Colorado to tour 165 Forest Avenue, a massive ultra-modern AD Architectural Digest Logomansion 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.

Top Modern Home Tours: “Nithurst Farm” In South Downs, England (Video)

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.

Read article

Top Modern Home Tours: “Devon Passivhaus” – East Devon, England (Video)

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.

Website

Italian Home Tours: “Villa Agave – Positano” (Video)

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.

Top Homes & Estates: “Pyramid Point” In St. Croix, Virgin Islands

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.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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.

Website

Home Tours: “The Malt House” In Chipping Campden, The Cotswolds, England (Country Life)

Country Life Magazine (July 26, 2020):

Country Life Magazine July 2020Chipping 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.’

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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.

Read full article

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.

French Château Tours: Historic 17th Century In Béarn Region (Video)

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.