A Young Couple with an Eye for the Unusual Create an Unforgettable Interior

To create a living room scaled to their vast collection of modern art, Marino converted four small rooms into one loft-like space. At right is Gilbert and George’s Growing Up.

“Art is part of the environment,” says Marino, who helped the couple assemble their collection.  Cambodian sandstone heads are displayed near Damien Hirst’s Potassium Chloride. Love, 1966, is by Robert Indiana.

On one wall of the entrance hall is a five-panel canvas by Jorge Pardo. Anish Kapoor’s Blood Solid is on the floor. Felix Gonzalez-Torres did the light sculpture. The gorilla console is by François-Xavier Lalanne.

Many of the furnishings, accessories and fabrics in the living room, as throughout, were designed by Marino’s firm, including the pair of ebonized and gilded-brass bookcases, the fringed sofas, the bronze pillow fabric and, at right, the pair of lampshades trimmed with antique sari fabric. On the circa 1970 Plexiglas low table is a circa 1900 hammered-bronze bowl from Japan. The painting, Witness, is by Richard Serra.

“It’s a very gracious house,” says Marino, who preserved original elements such as the crown molding. “There’s nothing tight or narrow.”

The first piece of art the couple bought together—Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #767—dominates a living room sitting area. The pair of slipper chairs are Marino’s own design.

The dining room’s vertical-stripe wallcovering makes a lively backdrop for a light sculpture by Leo Villareal, over the mantel, and a work by Paola Pivi, at right. The lamps are by Josef Hoffmann. Tiffany’s silverware.

Converting a club into a residence is “adaptive reuse,” says Marino. “It was fascinating to watch the switch.”

“I said, ‘Let’s go nuts here and make the whole room an artwork,’ ” Marino says of the powder room, which was painted by Eli Sudbrack. The cabinet is by Gio Ponti; the chandelier is by Verner Panton.

Marino treated the paneling in the master bedroom with Venetian plaster. The canvas at right is by Mark Sheinkman; at left is a 1981 oil by Marc Chagall.

The Marbella family home is a project by one of my favorite architects, Spanish A-cero. The property is placed on the outskirts of Puerto Banús, in one of the most famous and exclusive developments in the Sun Coast. This development is located on one side of a mountain but very close to the coast, with plenty of Mediterranean vegetation.

The plot where the project is located has a notorious slope that goes down to the South from the street access. This fact would determinate the design to adapt the house to the environment and achieve excellent views of the Mediterranean Sea. The possibilities of the plot and the wishes of the property appear in the execution of this huge project.

The floor is rectangular and places the most used spaces to the south façade in order to enjoy the views. Here is where the plot is open to the outside.

The north façade, where is located the access to the house, is more sober but forceful from an architectonic point of view, with walls and plans crossed and cut. There is a path with geometric forms covered with a layer of water that goes to the main door. The windows are secondary on the aesthetics of the house, but really important to give light to the corridors, distributors or common spaces.

All the rooms, both public and private, are located in the rear part of the house, with the porch, the pool, the garden and a tennis court. In this part of the house, orientated to the south, the black glass windows are bigger to connect the outside with the inside, like the big one in the living room that hides in the floor automatically.

The greatest part, in architectonic terms, is the big volume over the porch where stays the main bedroom on the first floor.

The property is “dressed” with Roman transventilated travertine stone.

Inside, the house has wide spaces, all of them modeled by natural light.

The property is developed in three levels:

The low floor is the most public space and includes the living-room, kitchen, dining room, laundry and a little service room.

The first floor is the most private area and here we can find the bedrooms and a little office.

The ground floor is dedicated to a relax area, with a spa, an internal pool, gym and garage. The large central courtyards that articulate the property core give light to this level of the house.

In 1997, around the time he turned 51, he took a few years off and then enrolled in art school. Then he began staging public performances with live avant-garde music and teams of painters who executed the large images he envisioned, and later he started devising art-producing algorithms, using TVs and computer monitors as dynamic “canvases” for his work.

He also began dating Tricia Bell, a physician. In 2005, four months into their courtship, Mr. McCarthy showed her blueprints for his future home and studio in the San Francisco’s Mission district. When Dr. Bell, now 59, asked about a space labeled “Tricia’s Room,” he explained, “It’s a room you can transform however you please.” And if she ever became peeved with him, he told her, “it can be your little retreat.”

It was a bold move so early in their relationship. But, he recalled, “I was already certain how I felt about Tricia, and I needed to make my intentions known.”

Dr. Bell, who is now his wife, was charmed.

The gritty fringe neighborhood where he had bought a 10,000-square-foot structure wasn’t where he had first planned to settle, but his efforts to build a contemporary home on upscale Russian Hill had met opposition. So when he unexpectedly found this 1925 concrete building amid auto body shops, he took the leap, buying it for $2.3 million.

Originally a Lucky Strike cigarette warehouse, it had also been the home of Capp Street Project, an organization known for its experimental art installations in the basilica-like main hall, a vast concrete room rising 24 feet to a pitched skylighted roof. Ann Hamilton once blanketed the floor there with 750,000 honey-dipped pennies, Bill Viola installed an indoor redwood forest and Carl Cheng flooded the room like a swimming pool.

The next owner had carved up the space, though, so Mr. McCarthy was unaware of the building’s art world provenance. But Stanley Saitowitz, the designer he hired to renovate it, remembered the warehouse from its Capp Street days and set about reclaiming it as a place for making art.

“Clive gave us a pretty open canvas,” Mr. Saitowitz said. “We wanted to create emptiness: a playground for his experiments, for all the different things he works on simultaneously.” The idea was to restore the openness and rawness of the space by peeling away dropped ceilings, paneling and partitions, and then to insert into that rough setting “little jewels or set pieces,” he said, meaning discrete rooms or objects with greater refinement and intimacy.

Now, where redwoods once soared, a spiral stairway encased in steel rods rises to a roof garden. Mr. McCarthy’s studio takes center stage in the big central space, where his “Electric Paintings” morph and regenerate on skeletal screens. One level up, on the original perimeter mezzanine, Mr. Saitowitz created pockets of domesticity, like a huge master bath lined in pristine white tile with a rain feature. In the open kitchen, a 39-foot silvery granite work island doubles as a dining table.

Dr. Bell said she has never needed to retreat, peeved, into “Tricia’s Room,” but she has transformed it with a green wall like the one in the bedroom that recalls Mr. Viola’s redwoods.

Meanwhile, the creative spirit of the building’s earlier days has spontaneously seeped back. Artist friends gather for group critiques, and when the couple invites avant-garde ensembles to rehearse or perform, the whole place resonates with music.

The designers of this house, Korean Iroje KHM Architects probably weren’t interested in creating a traditionally designed home, so they came up with this. The wild angles definitely give a grandiose appearance to the home, making it seem big, powerful and surely modern.

This scenic site is a part of the residential area developed in the natural greenery area of the mountain gwanggyo and that is located at the entrance area to trail to mountain.

From agony about the direction to which major living space see, the plan of this house started. After all, the direction to the opposite mountain that will be preserved in the natural green space forever was selected. But this charming selection that introduce the permanent natural landscape brought the problem, bad solar condition, that the major living space is faced to northwest sunlight. And so, we must make the solution to absorb the southern and eastern sunlight into the inside of the house.

“Glass box of light” that will absorb the useful sunlight was introduced to inside space of the various level and these boxes which are planted with flower and fruit are functioned as “Floating glass garden”. Actually, we solved the problem and we own both the two conditions that are the introduction of landscape and ecological environment and naturally, we have been reached to the complex solution that all the rooms have their own garden.
The dynamic, unrealistic interior space which are produced with several floating glass boxes over the major living space that is opened to the vertical height of 3 floors, will be the symbolic impression of this house.

We expect that this landscape architecture will coexist with the surrounding context for a long time, as if a small purple hill….

NEW JERSEY isn’t far from Manhattan, but in lifestyle, it can feel a world apart. That’s why Barbara Littman, an interior designer who lives in Highland Park, N.J., insists on having an urban pied-à-terre.

This Miami Loft by Toronto’s Prototype Design Lab was designed for a celebrity client. This residence has incredible spanning views of the local beach front on two sides and has a bespoke quality to its interior design. Juxtaposition between the more traditional design features and the more modern and sleek components such as the bedroom media unit and master bathroom vanity come together elegantly in this project.

This characteristic also renders the space dreamlike as well as a perfect entertainment space. Every element has been custom designed to the smallest detail to fit the particular needs of our client and his desires and habits.

This warehouse conversion is in Melbourne’s inner city Abbotsford, a modern refit of an old warehouse shell. Decks and courtyards, voids and levels. Modern with the old. Exposed brick and lots of slick.

Ground Floor: 1 bedroom with courtyard, open plan study and second living room with original roller-door blind and full height operational door/windows, large bathroom with laundry, courtyard and lock up garage. Whole floor could easily be used as home office.

First Floor: Huge open plan living, dining, kitchen and meals area with expansive kitchen joinery, pantry, black mirrored splashback, stunning island bench area and extensive outdoor room-style entertainer’s courtyard.

Second Floor: Oversized master bedroom with city views, walk in robe and ensuite, 3rd bedroom, an amazing wrap around balcony and sun deck.

Situated in a turn of the century candy factory, this 2700 sf loft penthouse suite by Johnson Chou was one of Toronto’s first residential adaptive re-use projects of its kind. The owner, an avid sportsman with a penchant for traveling to remote areas to camp in the wilderness, requested a residence that evoked, within an urban context, a sense of the landscape he loved so much.

Capitalizing on the generous ceiling heights on the first level of the loft, the spaces are linked by many variations in level, the architectural promenade manifesting as ramps and steps evocative of the outdoors. With ebony wood veneer panels the ground floor comprising of kitchen, living, dining, study / guest quarters and ensiute is intentionally dark and chiaroscuro.

Accessed by a bird-cage / tree-like spiral stair, the second level by contrast is bright and airy as if one were to reach the top of a tree. With spectacular views of downtown, a large deck with dining and lounge areas is envisioned as an extension of the master bedroom.

Vast living spaces, soaring ceilings set this magnificent Fitzroy, Australia church conversion in a class of its own. The handsome bluestone building was built as The Bible Christian Church in 1860; subsequently a tabernacle and a furniture factory, it is constructed of bluestone with tall brick-embellished Georgian windows.

The wide Greek-Revival style façade was added in 1911.Entry though a pair of massive timber doors is to a vestibule which steps up to the grand living room (155 sq.m. approx), flooded with light, and featuring a stone open fireplace. At one end is a fitted study, and at the other is a splendidly proportioned dining area. (Here, a faded painted banner proclaiming ‘Holiness Becomes Thy House’ testifies to the building’s provenance.)

The kitchen, elegantly fitted with Smeg appliances and marble benchtops, adjoins a butler’s pantry. Two sets of French doors open to a broad east-facing paved terrace with views over Fitzroy. To the other side of the entrance hall are 2 double bedrooms (one opening to a small courtyard), separated by a smart family-size bathroom. Above is a mezzanine gallery with a study area at one end, leading to the apartment-sized main bedroom/retreat, with dressing room, bathroom and separate W/C.

On the upper level is a voluminous storage space with potential for conversion to further accommodation. The garage level, entered from a right-of-way and including a cellar, storeroom, powder room and workshop, might be modified to include a rumpus room or work-from-home space.

Layered with Fitzroy history and retaining exquisite period detail, this light-filled property minutes from Brunswick Street features hydronic heating, richly polished timber floors, security entry and quality fittings. It’s one of a kind!

If you like it, you can even buy it now.

Some architects have a dash of gypsy blood and feel impelled to move on, no matter how comfortable their present abode. No sooner have they completed one house, to the great relief of their families, than they are thinking about the next.

Even one as rigorous and consistent as Jerrold E. Lomax feels that urge, and he and his wife, Sandra E. Miles, have just completed their fourth residence. All were bold modernist statements, and the latest is the most radical and pared-down of them all: a loft in a live-work complex that Lomax helped develop in Sand City, a small coastal town just north of Monterey, California. His neighbors are warehouses and an electrical distribution building, and he’s matched their grittiness with poured-concrete and corrugated-metal cladding. I t was quickly dubbed “industrial chic,” and the owners delight in the kinetic sculpture of moving lights on the elevated freeway, even though this blocks the ocean view.

It’s a far cry from the refined pavilions of steel and glass that Lomax designed for Craig Ellwood in the 1950s, a job that brought him back to his native Los Angeles from Houston, where he went to school. And it may seem an odd shift from the elegant house on a leafy view site that the couple built in Carmel Valley, California, when he wound up his practice in L.A. and moved north. Lomax sees his latest venture as are turn to the frugal experiments of his early years, when idealistic young architects were striving to reshape postwar America and make well-designed housing available to all.

In its collective character, the complex recalls Gregory Ain’s terrace housing and, in its unabashed materiality, the livework space that Charles and Ray Eames built for themselves.

The Jerrold Lomax loft displays his signature expression of volume,fine details and sustainable matierials. Walls of glass, front/rear decks, grooved sawcut concrete flooring, radiant heat, chefs kitchen; a modern contemporary work of art.