Trends New Zealand Trends Volume 31 No 12 New Zealand | Page 12

Top floor

First floor

Ground floor
Ground floor

Legend to plans: 1 entry,
2 living room, 3 kitchen, 4 patio,
5 professional office, 6 garage,
7 guest suite, 8 studio, 9 pool,
10 family room, 11 bedroom,
12 master suite, 13 home office.

Bold, unconventional, daring – no matter how
you describe this new house, words will not do
it justice. And that’s because it was designed to
do something completely different.
Owner Nicole Vidalakis, of Portola Valley,
California, commissioned architect Robert
Swatt to design her an artwork, not a house.
“Nicole didn’t really want a house,” Swatt
says. “She wanted a work of art that happened
to be a place to call home.”
“This was never about comfort,” Vidalakis
says. “I was inspired by the Johnson Glasshouse
in Connecticut that sits like a sculpture in the

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landscape. I wanted people to question the
building and see it as a piece of art.”
Swatt says the typography of the site, which
has a slight slope, helped to determine the form
of the house.
“The building needed to engage with the
landscape, so we stepped it down the hill, creating a soaring volume at the lower level. Simple,
natural materials were also key – the house is
a composition of overlapping and intersecting planes of wood, glass, metal and concrete,
which give it a very elemental look.”
Windows on the long axis are framed in