Home Design Find

No Comments »

The Lovely and Surreal Architecture of Casa Luz

At first sight, these joyous rich reds and whites, the contrasting textures with the white hand-plastered wall, and the air of spartan cleanliness in the white industrial design are exhilarating.

What a great foyer… are these hip, cool dental offices, perhaps?

The red and white structure, a renovation by  ARQUITECTURA-G , can be glimpsed within an old stone ruin in Cilleros, in Spain’s Extremadura.

We are used to romanticising ruins like this.

But the narrow, windowless site within a hand-plastered wall was beyond disrepair when a young family sought to remake it as their home.

They were not content with merely inserting new shutters into the ancient stone walls, lovely as these are in their contrast.

The Casa Luz (House of Light) is a radical renovation of a ruin into housing for a young family.

The new interior fills the tiny lot and wraps the rooms around an open central courtyard bringing light in from above.

A tree that had grown in the center of the lot was kept on.

The wraparound rooms of the home have an almost surrealistic air of antiseptic modernity.

The greenery from the old tree is the perfect graphic foil, softening the harsh, sterile railings and white-painted industrial walkways.

Along the long back wall, the house only extends the width of a passageway, widening out into the living area/kitchen/dining on the second floor.
Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments »

Once-Soggy Farmhouse Takes Shabby Chic to Nth Degree

A rustic, and toppling old wooden farmhouse in upstate New York is renovated in a classic style by replacing one entire wall of the clapboard siding.

Its huge rustic beams are retained, now offset by stark white walls and the huge window, opening up one entire wall to the views and light.

The renovation is handled with wit and reserve.

No-nonsense polished concrete floors play off the sentimentality of an old-world kitchen island.

The rich patina of the old wooden farmhouse floors is countered by a new rusted steel fireplace that threads through both floors.

In the now luminous and spacious farmhouse kitchen this fireplace becomes a pizza oven and firewood stack, while the wooden beam seems to have reverted to a living tree trunk. Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments »

Design Dilemma: A New Take on Gray in Taiwan

Sophisticated, neutral, tranquil and never garish, gray has become a go-to color for designers aiming to please picky clients… And truth be told, it’s also become a little boring. Gray may be chic, but it is also the color of bleak winter days, hair after a certain age, bland orporate offices, and these days, many furniture catalogs. So what about a new take on a fashionable color? Recently we spotted this Taiwanese apartment which we think makes a masterful use of gray in a way that feels fresh, unexpected and inspiring.

Take a look:

What’s so cool about the use of gray here, is that Taiwan-based Ganna Studio chose very soft warm grays, almost ethereal in quality, that are punctuated with bright beachy colors — apple greens, turquoise, baby blues, oranges and yellows that we do not traditionally see used with gray. Here’s more:

What would be colors that we more traditionally see with gray? Well, certainly deep reds and burnt oranges have been popular in recent years. But a move away from those deeper tones  and the use of sunny purer color makes this minimal apartment feel youthful,  hip and happier.  Plus, color is varied and used in just the right doses — enough but not too much — which is important in this open concept space with sight lines in every direction. You’ll also notice that artwork is kept gray as well, so as not to distract from just the pure deliciousness of gray with color.

Bravo for a job well done!

Photography courtesy Gamma Studio