What's it like to live inside a castle or a museum?
Mansion a look at these unique homes, from an angular abode in Greece to an Alaskan home built to feel like a on water.
These are some of the most unique properties around the world, and we're going behind scenes with the residents and architects of these spaces.
Let's start in Buckinghamshire, England, where the 250-year-old Dint and Mini Castle was restored from ruins.
Dint and Castle in Buckinghamshire is just a little jewel full of history.
Not a defensive castle, but a mini castle.
Hola!
Welcome to my castle.
I'm Chaines-Armande.
So I'm Jimmy.
My wife and I,
we both saw it and we fell in love and we thought, well, it's shame that this place is in such a ruinous condition.
We spend at 100,000 purchasing the property and then more than 300,000 on the renovation.
The castle was originally built in 1769 by a gentleman that wanted to house his Ammonite fossil collection.
This Ammonite are imbibed all around the structure.
My role in the project was everything.
Older designer, I to call it extreme DIY.
Please come in.
So the castle is divided into three floors.
We've got the kitchen and dining.
This is the space where we are now.
Then we've got the seating room and two bedrooms.
We're going to be upstairs.
I try to keep as much as the original building, original fabric I could.
The original fireplace used to be here.
We managed to fit the hob perfectly there.
Here we got the breakfast bar and reminds me you can see plenty of shells all around.
They were from the Jurassic area and you can still see the remaining We're coming out from the kitchen,
this is the sitting room,
this is our favorite spot in the house,
it's where we spend more It's lovely,
I guess we've got this 360 views to the fields,
the the I chose to keep the red brick exposed because it contains also a lot of history about the building.
You can see initials and dates.
How do we hide the pipe work,
although the plumbing and electrics,
which is in fact behind this beautiful board that came from the same tree that made all the windows and windows in the house?
The staircase was by far the most challenging thing in the restoration process.
I had to do a 3D laser scan and the accuracy is amazing.
I the detail here is less than 20 millimeters.
around every wall.
We're now at the top floor where we've got the bedrooms.
Originally the space was an open plan and this used to be the meeting room.
This is a master bedroom.
This to the main door.
come with horse and cart to stop there and get up here.
This is a roof terrace.
It's very unique because you are literally under and surrounded by trees that makes you feel like you're in a tree house.
we're finding the castle very comfortable for leaving,
but it wouldn't allow us to have any more kids, so I'm afraid that at this point we do need to send it.
Whenever we move on, Also, we always feel proud of having a team.
We have achieved them and saved the building.
The triangular house was quite radical idea.
We like radical things.
Why the triangle?
I think that when I was there in Megara, everything passed through me, but it wasn't exactly me that decided, but the landscape itself.
Hello, I'm Tillamako Santriano.
And this is the residence in Megara.
This residence was conceived as an answer to a specific problem.
How to create a house, a space of intimacy, that may at the same time be as vigorous as we suppose it is.
mountain.
Me and my husband, we have a reasonably sized plot of land, 30 kilometres west of Athens.
We are in an olive grove, it's a rather a recluse site in the midst of nature.
We inherited it from my father, and we decided to take a decided to build a house.
It is 200 square meters, two bedrooms, a living room that incorporates everything, a kitchen, two bathrooms, and an internal garden.
We didn't have that in our mind, and then, It happened that we met Lémajou.
I have been an architect for 20 years.
Every day on my way to high school I was passing by an apartment block that proved kind of magnetic to me,
especially its exterior circular staircase.
And I was thinking it is possible to your apartment and feel the air, get the sun.
It was the first time I understood what architecture really is, how it can be seductive.
Architecture is composition.
To compose is to put together.
To place together.
Even for a composer.
completely new structure.
There is always something that already exists there.
The the landscape, its sunlight should all be mediated.
That's why the own site visit is crucial.
The earth with its warm color is as well as this remoteness from the city, this quietness.
We wanted something simple, but elegant.
He said at an Emma house, I just want something Doric.
Doric is the most austere of the three ancient Greek orders.
historic Ionic Corinthin and he certainly did not have in mind a house with ancient like columns.
He wanted the inherent austerity of that style.
So, Tilemechus wandered around two, three hours.
Two complimentary ideas came there.
A house with a main courtyard and the triangle.
The two sides are more closed protective with only vertical slits as openings,
while the third one is completely transparent and opens up the interior to this magnetic mountain.
Initially I thought it was aggressive.
The way he spoke about the house convinced us that he worked on it, he loved it and he made us love it.
The Sentiment Garden is an initiation to the houses in a world, the plants are I believe in synergy with its concrete walls.
So this is the main courtyard.
It's an area for the house's outer life.
The house has a green roof and this corner will be eventually covered by the roof's plants.
Through that door we finally enter into the main living space.
What dominates the interior is exactly the view of this opposite mountain.
The sliding glass panels may be completely put aside.
Every part of the house is the sofa because I can see everything.
It's like sitting outside in the olive grove.
The interior space is divided into three areas that may be subtly defined by this curvilinear curtain.
At the same time, there is an element that unifies all feeds this oblong feature out of golden mahoganywood.
It starts as a suspended fireplace.
suspended by its own chimney which is double chimney and continues as a long
dining table slightly lower than the kitchen bench and ends up here in the
kitchen with cupboards and preparation facilities in
I think this was the best design part of the house because I don't think a lot of people
have the privilege of washing dishes and having an unhindered view to a beautiful mountain.
through a closed corridor that lies exactly opposite to the opener one and leads to the sleeping quarters.
It feels like you are inside but at the same time in contact with the garden and in contact with the sky.
This is the master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom that's separated only by a curtain.
The bedroom and bathroom are directly connected to the entrance courtyard.
Let's get out again.
I don't believe in the notion of a creator.
I believe that a creator is essentially a mediator.
One should try to let all forces pass through him so that they are finally incarnated integration.
When you are in a radical house because it is a radical house It's not a common house,
okay, you live
With what it offers you without being really able to explain what it does it
asks from the owners to live in a certain way And that way is closer to nature than we are used to.
It is a house where you feel free all my life until now.
When was sleeping, I was looking at curtains.
Now I sleep and I see the stars.
That's the house for me.
One the great things about this site is that the tides change your scenery in an extreme way.
You when the tide is out,
you feel like the house is perched over a beach that you can kind of go and wander and when the tide is in,
the house feels as if it is almost like a boat sort of hovered right above the water.
Alright, come on, let's have a look.
This my living room.
Kristi had a lot of great ideas coming into the design.
She has an excellent design sensibility.
And this is what it's about.
Being on the water, seeing it, feeling it, hearing it.
My home is in Ketchikan, Alaska, which is an island.
Rivilla, Gallegos Island in Southeast Alaska.
So if you look around, all we have, we have a lot of wood, but what's not wood are the floors.
The are cement.
That was a priority that I let the architects know.
I cement floors, and I want them heated.
Concrete's heavy, right?
The challenge was that we wanted to create this cantilever.
So in this case, we did design with our engineer a cantilevered slab.
and a pretty significant stem wall that holds that to create the effect that you get in the house.
And you put a hydronic heating system in there they have a warmth to them that when you're there and you're walking on them you're
you're feeling that radiant heat they're very durable they're beautiful.
You can see there's a lot of pink in this house the kitchen's pink I'm even wearing pink slippers today.
I wouldn't say I love pink, but it does seem to be a thread that I've always carried through in my selection of interiors.
I had this On the, if I ever build a house idea in my head, this is what I wanted.
It's still a conch range from France.
It's a French cooking top with the saute part on the two ovens or the electric and gas.
My water is all sketched from a cistern.
So all this is rain water.
That water is collected.
It through a purification process.
You can see how the rainwater is caught and comes down and fills these tanks and the shower, the laundry, everything is rainwater.
When you're looking at this from a site plan or from a floor plan view,
you'll see that there are two main volumes and then this interstitial space that creates a second volume and the
deck in the entry and then the reading.
What I wanted with the deck space was covered.
We get a lot of rain.
We don't get the snow that you think of as Alaska, but we get rain.
Probably 177 inches of rain, that's a lot of rain.
So when people say it rains in Seattle, they been to Kitch, Canalaska.
For some reason I collected kilns, I've traveled a lot through Turkey, India, and I would get carpets.
And we can even see them over here in the nook where I had One made into pillows,
so we cut the kilom, it was old, it was kind of beat up, and then we made it into pillows for the nook.
Again, that feeling of a Turkish tea room that I was going with, because there's just lots of coziness, pillows in those tea houses.
So I couldn't have my tea here, but I just read, I sit here, it's comfortable.
yellow cedars indigenous to southeast Alaska, so really wanted yellow cedar to use it.
When we use those products that are local materials, it just sort of adds to the connection to the place.
And it also saves cost because we don't need to ship that material from far away.
And now I'll show you the rest of the house.
So here's the primary bedroom.
And then...
And what I really wanted was this egg chair so that I could sit and watch So,
when I'm looking this direction down the coastline,
I can see that volume extend out and I can see the chair hanging in the corner,
but at the same time, I can't see enough of the bedroom where it feels overly exposed.
When you're in the bedroom, you're seeing the living room volume cantilever, you get that kind of understanding of the space that you're in.
Outside of finding the wood and the elements that we used to build the house that were here,
we had to ship a lot of things,
so just the bedding, the furniture, probably in the budget of about 40,000, so it was under that.
thousand dollars for freight.
And that's about 30 to 50% more than I would see in an urban house.
When we are approaching a site,
Especially a beautiful sight like this, we're looking at not only where we have interior spaces, but where we have exterior spaces.
Let's go outside!
Now what I really, really wanted when I talked to the landscaper was a strawberry wall.
So again, accomplished, we have lots of strawberries planted throughout the rockwork.
There's so many, oh my goodness, look at them all growing, and they vine.
So over the years the expectation is it's just going to be covered in strawberries.
I'll pick them, I'll eat them fresh, I'll make jams.
They well with rhubarb, which is right here too.
I grow a lot of rhubarb because it also grows well in southeast Alaska.
The landscaping budget was 100,000, and I know I used that whole budget amount.
I'm a pediatric dentist, and I was contracting services with the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium.
There wasn't a presence for a pediatric specialist in Ketchikan,
so with the help of the Indian Health Service, I started a business here, a practice.
We're in a place that it's all about water,
we live on an island, so I think reflecting that in your home is a space I want to be in, I enjoy being in.
I worked closely with my banker, we're going to give you a loan to build this house.
The total came to about $2,070,000.
And at the end of the day, he said, I do want you to know it's what he called a vanity house.
So that's kind of what we call this, don't look at it as this investment that's going to make you money down the road.
It's your home, it's what you want to be, but have that joke we call it the vanity house.
["The Vanity It's a very modern design.
In some ways it's like going to a museum, a little gallery, but it's also very much a family home.
Hi, I'm David.
Welcome to our house.
Come on in.
The home is about 6,000 square feet.
It four bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms.
We lost a home on this piece of property to a catastrophic fire in October of 2014.
And so then we engaged with an architect.
The home is designed with a couple of purposes in mind,
we do a lot of collecting of art and we also do a lot of entertaining.
And thought the two functions worked well together.
This is the gallery.
I think of it as really the backbone of the design in the home.
One of the really nice pieces in the gallery is that with this kind of space is this large bird here.
It's an African piece.
When we saw this piece after we'd already started the design of the house,
we knew this is the place that it needs to be, because it's going to be the piece you're going to see from the street.
Even in our family spaces, we like to display art.
Over here, we have Carl Apple lithograph, and then over here, we kind of have one of our odd little mixes.
We have a mirror lithograph, and we have combined mirror with this bronze ship that is a piece of African tribal art.
I don't know that it makes any sense to anybody else, but for us, it works great.
The house is designed with these long axes that run all the way through the house.
This is one of my favorite.
As you come through the front door and turn to your right,
you come into and you get this long vista that goes all the way down the length of the house and you pass
through a couple of living spaces into our dining room.
The art was specifically selected to fit in that space to draw your eyes and to draw you into the space in here.
In between the dining room in that area is this living room library.
I to read, I to accumulate books, I like to collect.
I wanted a room for about 4,000 books.
The two levels accommodate that.
This is the second floor area of the library.
For me,
some of my favorite books are up here, and the stuff that I'm proud as about is my fur trade and mountain man stuff.
I started buying some of the first edition accounts of some of these mountain men,
and so that was really the inspiration for this particular piece of art over here.
And what we have here is the Continental Divide, basically the Rocky Mountains running from Canada all the way down to Mexico below the fireplace.
This is the Rio Grande River.
running right down through here.
We have a vacation home and house which would be somewhere along here and then you've got the ark and saw and I could bore you to
death describing different features of the geography of that.
The house that was here originally was one story and we were
You've got to have a second story on this house because of this magnificent view that's out here.
Now, one of the building elements that we had that we added is this wood.
This is a Japanese Techno.
technique in this wood where the wood is charred to a certain point and there's a certain
irony in having it here because we lost the house that was here originally to a fire and it
just seemed fitting to add some burned wood to the new house yet it's a beautiful element in the design.
Another quick feature we have this outdoor store stairway which has a very practical
application but it was real important to us surviving a fire we wanted multiple ways to get out of the house.
You through the house, you get a different look into another room that you've never seen before.
There's always some new discovery and we really enjoy having folks come to our
home be our guest so I want to thank you for coming here today I hope the
tour has been interesting for you it has certainly been interesting for me and I
look forward to seeing you come Towy Barclay Castle described as an L-plan tower house, but most people would say, it's a castle.
It's got all the features, the thick walls, the shot holes, the gun loops, everything you want in a castle is here.
We're very blessed with a magnificent arched front doorway,
and if you look up just you see a boss in the center with the Barclay coat of arms,
which is fantastic that it survived all these years as the building sat empty for 200 years before we came along.
My husband and I bought Tali Barclay in 1972 for thousand pounds and it was every penny we had.
The castle was completely overgrown.
You couldn't find the front door because of the undergrowth, but we were determined from day one.
and worked our way through the first phase of the restoration which was the ground floor and the first floor.
Everything was a challenge, every single thing.
First of all, one of the worst jobs was chipping off cement that was plastered onto the entrance hallway walls.
We spent months chiseling away all this grey cement.
front door, you turn left and you go down the entrance barrel vaulted corridor.
This leads you straight ahead to the main spiral staircase, but on the left we have the original kitchen with our auger.
This castle has always been home to me.
It's all I ever knew growing up.
Even just sitting in the kitchen next to the agar,
I've so many lovely memories of when I was younger and when I was growing up there were several occasions to remember the real family visiting.
My mum would be playing the guitar and my dad would be farting around and it's just, yeah, it's home.
I everybody has their memories of home.
but it is quite an unusual homeless one.
Across from the kitchen is our dining room.
We have our candle lit dinners in there.
Before people visit the castle, I imagine they sometimes have ideas that might be a little bit cold or cold.
creepy or, you know, filled with ghosts, I don't know.
Just about everybody who comes says,
oh my gosh, you know, it's so cozy and it's so nice and friendly and it's not creepy at all.
It's at all.
you come into the Great Hall,
You feel like you're stepping back in time,
because all of the things that we bought for the Great Hall are of the period,
and really make you feel like you're in another age.
The ceiling is ribbon growing,
vaulting, and there are other There carved stones on the ceiling, the coats of arms of the king, James of Scotland
first of England, and the other is of the Barclay coat of arms.
My husband particularly was interested in works of art and painting, so we have quite a few magnificent paintings.
One of my favourite places to hang out when I was little was in the minstrels gallery in the great hall.
This is way up high, it's kind of like a little hidden spot and it had big velvet curtains so you could pull them across.
But when I was a young child I used to love hiding up there and I would draw the curtains
and I would make my own little house in there.
And then if you continue up the spiral staircase, you come to the library.
It's just a very cozy, wonderful place to sit and read.
It has an oak beam ceiling and wall-to-wall books, leather-bound books.
So the library is part of the new aspect of the castle.
To build the top two floors, we had to demolish a building nearby to get out the dressed red sandstone.
And so we stockpiled it on the front lawn and we had it to build the top two floors.
I love growing up here.
At moments where I was quite envious of my friends with their more normal houses, the walls are really difficult to stick anything to.
It to drive me nuts when I was a teenager because I had all these posters in my bedroom
that I wanted to stick on the walls, but they would all fall off.
I appreciate this is definitely a first world castle problem.
As you look down from the castle towards the walled garden, you see the woodland and the garden itself sunken down about 12 feet.
On the north side is the stable block are the gardeners cottage which is a
guest house for our own guests and the carriage room and this is a magnificent
room that was built to receive Queen Victoria's visit in around about 1900 or thereabouts.
We built the main entrance gate and the bell tower ourselves so that we'd have a really nice entrance to the garden.
And as you walk in,
you see the garden laid out in the cruciform pattern with flower beds around the outer edges with roses, clematis, and a herbaceous border.
We believe this was the original design because we found the roots of some of the old hedge still underneath the trees,
and it appeared to be the design that we now have.
The sundial in the center is a Dutch design.
We bought it in Holland, and it is accurate to the minute on Greenwich Mean Time.
If we have sun, you have to have sun for it to work.
The wall for the greenhouse was complete when we bought the property.
The only thing that was missing was the greenhouse itself.
So we knew the height of the building, and so we built the rest.
It's been a great thing to have.
I've put in a kiwi vine which produces about 200 kiwis every year and then flowers for the garden are grown in there.
So my mum and dad have always been very passionate about conservation and traditional building skills, and it was a huge focus for my dad.
He just felt so strongly that we were very lucky in this country to have these amazing people.
amazing buildings, but these building skills that are required to maintain these properties are just disappearing.
Without any doubt, purchasing Towy Barclay was the most exciting thing we'd ever done.
And it was fantastic to be able to actually own this building.
We've spent a lot of time cleaning the stone, which was a laborious, boring job beyond belief, and there was a lot of it.
It was a job that now you would probably do with shot blasting,
but being soft sandstone, you could damage the stone if you weren't careful.
So we went around with a wire brush and it showed up.
scrubbed and cleaned every single stone.
We wanted to base ourselves here at Towy Barplay and bring up our family here and that we've achieved over the last 15 years.
This property is quite big for one person now that my husband passed away and I think the time has worked.
right.
I'm looking forward to a new owner taking it to the next level and I know every inch of this property really well so I can tell them anything that they
might want to know about it.
Hi, I'm Arthur Becker.
I'm the tenant in this house and I'm also a landlord.
I'm an artist as well and This house reflects both work that I like,
that I've made,
and work of artists that I've collected, mostly primitive and Neolithic and early history art that I find as both an inspiration for me.
just shapes that I like to live with.
I love the location.
It's on Sullivan Street, which is a really charming block in Western Soho.
I have this fascination with money,
not the accumulation of it in career,
but also the way that our culture, me in particular, but all people, it seems to me, are fascinated on money.
I'm taking the art and creating it to express a more lyrical view on money itself was something that seemed to really capture me.
In the living room, there's a couple of pieces here that I really like.
There's a Mel Bockner,
the Blah Blah Blah series,
which is,
he's such a painterly artist,
has such a command of color and texture,
painted on velvet,
and clearly the Blah Blah is so contemporary, meaning it doesn't really mean anything, but as an object itself it plays and it works.
And the corner is a piece I bought in England.
one of my favorite pieces from the Mesopotamia.
It was beautiful and I just fell in love with the scale of it and the detail of it.
And then against the wall here is a collection of pots and ceramics and stone carvings that range from 4 or 5,000 BC through maybe,
I don't know, 500 AD.
And these pots and figures really give me a way to viscerally connect with time before our current sort of human blossom.
So I love having them around.
downstairs parlors painted a deep black,
and in that room I have a piece of money flies which is sort of folded real currency origami into butterfly origami.
The inspiration there was a screen painting by Coron Ogata who is a
Japanese artist in 1608 who really invented the abstraction of Japanese It's an appropriation of something to maybe almost 400 years ago.
In the hall there's a series of money currency roses that have been folded into roses,
arranged almost like the Damien Hirst colored dot series that he did, very much an appropriation of that.
money.
On the landing of the second floor against the wall is an Anselm Kiefer-inspired texture of a white background with drips of gray paint creating more of a texture than I've done before with the
money flies sort of also again assembled just in some light fluttering flying away lyrical way.
So in the dining room we use Venetian plaster which I really liked in gray and it's
mirrored surfaces and there's only a few pieces in there.
Over the fireplace is a piece that's sort of a collage of large scale printed money and large scale money bands.
And I love the idea of doing sort of a collection of supply chain elements within money because it's just,
you know, it's money and it's accessories.
It's not as solemn as sun and not as lyrical as others, but I like worked out.
I purchased some Han Dynasty ceramic figures.
I had them 3D scanned in large, printed, and then I cast them in gummy bear colors.
And I really liked the way of bringing that past into the present and playing with scale and color leaving true to form the detail,
the nuances of the shape.
That really I felt like it was an honest and contemporary way to bring something from the past into the present.
In the junior master of the third floor, in that room, on the wall are two currency mandolas and against one are folded U.S.
dollar bills into little Buddhas and the other is into human skulls, very Damien Hirst kind of skulls.
So in the master bedroom,
which is again Venetian plaster,
but in white, which I kind of like, it faces the east, so I get the benefit of the morning light.
Against the fireplace, there are two niches, there used to be closets, but I don't need that many closets.
replace them with shelves.
I like two pieces in particular that I found up.
They both have two heads on one figure.
I don't think those were, I think they're really mother, father, or husband, wife, or mother, daughter.
And it was interesting that the one I have from the Indus Valley is so similar conceptually from the one that's pre-Columbian.
In the kitchen, which is where I spend most of my time, I've got a bunch of things that I'm working on.
I'm really excited about a most recent piece I just got yesterday.
It's the first two halves of the first half of an Anatolia and violent shaped head,
it's beautifully abstract, it's almost geometric with a round and a rectangular and a square.
You it's 4,000 years old, it really sort of pierces history for me.
And, you know, I'm really fascinated by creating that into a texture that I can live with.
with, you know, in my house.
I'm really fascinated now by learning and getting comfortable with the process of scanning,
enlarging through print,
changing and fixing the texture,
then rubber molds, and building them, making wax figures out of them so I can then make sand molds and bronze.
or metal sculptures, something that I really know is history itself, honestly translated into the present.
The whole shape surprised me.
There are many cars in that building and there are also two emblematic cats.
I will tell you what instructional authorities said about the house.
They said it's the tear or the eye of the god.
I mainly see a teardrop.
The eye of the god is the son who comes all over the place.
Hello, my name is George, and welcome to our home.
I live in Iraqlion.
We decided to buy this.
ground because of the view.
So we are entering the main living room.
This room is the room of light.
We a lot of sunlight.
In Crete we are people who live with the light.
Light is a light.
over.
It's very aggressive.
The curve in front of the house is philosophically the resistance of the concrete to the sun.
Since the house necessarily would face this radiant sun, it should be more receptive.
It should be bent by the sun's cause from You will go to the kitchen where if you have a good cook,
you can prepare something fantastic to eat because Crete has a lovely variety of very good food.
The living room is in between the cantilevered volume.
and the volume of the base which acts as a podium and hosts the sleeping quarters.
Most of what is going on in the house you cannot imagine that from the outside.
Going enters the guest room that is in contact with two open airspaces.
The one is evident on the facade.
It is its main cut.
The other one is completely hidden from plable view.
It is a cut of the roof underneath which one may find an open or bath.
I wouldn't advise you to jump in it,
but it It's very nice to cool your body in the very hot nights or days of the summer and we have
a lot of them.
The other part.
is also very interesting because at that part you have the tear of God and that's
the view that's the head of Zeus who is very kindly to us So,
now for the easy part I will take the elevator to show you the rest of the house.
Hello again, so here we are entering our main bedroom.
This is the master bedroom where we sleep, we have two more for the kids.
So I'll show you my secret place in the house and my secret place is very easy to access because you can open the truck.
up, and you just have to go downstairs.
It's meant to be a place where it's quiet and I can rest.
Fortunately enough, sometimes I can do that.
last but not least one other thing that is one of my demands that I had for this house.
So this is my playground for adults.
It's meant to put a car on it and to turn it around so you don't need to maneuver here.
This is one of the most peculiar designs that we have tried.
And I had certain doubts about not the architecture itself.
I was more concerned about its relation to the city.
But then I said, okay, we have to try.
I think that they essentially work together.
They get more alive in my eyes because of each other.
That neighborhood was invigorated by the city.
this playful house, and this playful house is in a sculptural dialogue with its neighbors.
Playing with the structure is an idea that we took through the entire home.
Each of the main spaces, I can't really ring out of the home.
You get to be sort of free-floating.
We paid $400,000 for five and quarter acres with almost 500 feet of shoreline.
Now we're living in our dream home.
The homeowners asked me to design a home that they could.
We wanted this to be an age-in-place house,
and so that to us said that we wanted it to be on one floor, the main living space.
But then how do we create these views and the sense of the landscape for the main living areas?
It started with my involvement with a museum in up to Charlotte called the Beckler Museum of Modern Art.
It a lovely cantilever design.
I to learn the word meant that it looked like you were flying that kind of suspended in mid-air.
The was a Mario Bota building famous architect.
He certainly used these cantilevers and expressive volumes in the museum and so we brought some of that language here as well.
Having these cantilevers stick out here allows you to come in, be here, be in mid-air and experience the nature around us.
I remember when Toby first presented the very first hand-drawn outline of what the house
would look like and he drew the music room with a heart as the piano.
Let me take you into the heart of the home.
It is really designed for the baby grand piano right at its center.
You can see the bookshelves here how they kind of pop out here and pop back in
just like when you play the piano and you push them in and they're I grew up in a household with a piano,
and when we got married and got our first house, the first purchase we had was a piano.
So it typically is used just by me, often late at night.
I think it is the center of the house.
The great room is designed around the structure of the wood beams up above and the posts, holding them.
up.
They start outside in front of the building and carry through the entire house to help opening up the views on all directions and allow for glass to be
around the entire great room.
We are on the terrace outside which is an entirety floating in the
It's held up by these posts right here that are wide on this side to hold back the afternoon sun,
but really slender on this side to allow the views from inside to go through.
This is one type of cantilever held up by the post and beam structure.
Over here is the studio.
It is held up by these poles, which the clients later lovingly call the chopsticks.
They on the ground, pierce through the space inside and pop out on the top.
As we're transitioning from the great room to the studio space, we're going through this tighter, but light fit.
The floor is different from the living room and from the studio, but we kept them all perfectly on one level.
The behind that is so that in later years, this becomes wheelchair accessible.
This notion of it needed to be in one level was a critical one.
My dad is...
and so have gotten very conscious of when you're going over any kind of a transition.
At the end of the hallway you reach the studio office.
Here you can also see the chopsticks coming out of the ground and into the ceiling.
You can see how they're a little bit angled and how they become a playful element inside the space.
My office enjoys the house but it's in its own little building in some ways and it's always very cool that I can walk out into my breezeway and look across
and be seeing the foyer from the other.
This courtyard is designed around each of the building blocks that create interior spaces.
The shape of the pool really came from the building around it, and so it has the same layout and arrangement as the building itself.
I got to be the budget person, so at multiple points throughout, we decided that we had to kind of step back and take stock.
And so in his original list was to have an Olympic swim lane.
So just building that swim lane was going to add, you know, upwards of a half of house.
So we had looked at that and said, you're not getting into a lane.
We'll get to a golf cart.
You can go down the road and go and use the neighborhood swimming pool.
Golf cart?
I'm not complaining.
I the golf cart.
Here we are right back into the great room with the kitchen on this side,
the dining table as well as the couch area over here.
When we looked at our current home,
we realized that we were living in not only a small fraction of the house,
but the places we were living in were probably the smallest, tightest spaces.
And so it was this idea of wanting to mill the spaces that we spent most of our time in.
One benefit of having these different areas in one great space is that the technology can work hand-in-hand as well.
In the kitchen cabinetry behind me is actually a projector that comes out and projects onto a screen that comes from
the ceiling in front of the glass towards the lake.
The cabinetry of the kitchen helps in making this space of this cantilever flow right into another cantilever which is the primary bar.
bedroom.
The primary bedroom area is really defined by two separate spaces.
We wanted to have a separation between the sleeping area and the sitting area
because we kind of sleep and work different hours and so we wanted to have
it where one can go to bed and the other one can stay up.
Behind these sliding We're also hiding this cut through,
and it takes you down this hallway,
laundry room, elevator, back right into the heart of the home, the music room, and the great room beyond.
The budget that we had given Toby was $2 million dollars to start with.
And we missed that a little bit.
It was above.
The as you might guess, you're never below.
The house was more complicated, and so there were more things that needed to be resolved as we went along.
We've been in the house about a year now.
Every once in a while, every couple of days, we stop and just take notice of something that we hadn't seen before.
There was an evening and I was sitting at the table doing a puzzle and I looked up and there was some sort of emotion in the foyer.
And what I realized was the sun was reflecting off the pool into the foyer.
and causing a ripple effect on the ceiling that was just magnificent.
It's not something you plan for, but when it happens, it's just magic.
My name is Malca Jeanette.
I am an architect.
We are in Los Altos Hills, California, in my own personal home that my husband and I built this year.
This is the house that we put a lot of inventions and innovations in.
In a way, I wanted to sneak in a little bit of a requirement that my husband had for Star Trek.
Hi guys, welcome to Jeanette Residence.
Please come on in.
The cost of the home is approximately 10 million,
so we have six bedrooms in total, six and a half bathrooms, then dining room and the main living room.
So this is the dining room which is one of the most unique aspects of the design that we've done in this house.
So if you see it from down below, From the basem*nt side, it's actually Star Trek Enterprise in a very abstract manner.
But to experience the dining room to the fullest, you have to see it with this whole door wide open.
So the style of the house is very minimalistic modern.
It's a very much of an open floor plan.
From the kitchen you can see the swimming pool of the kids are swimming you could see the family room if you're all are watching TV
So the idea is it's a very interactive flow of the house.
I Really wanted to use this pool to create some color and that's where this whole Michelangelo's painting came into the process.
The way the both the hands connect we've centered it right underneath the dining room and it just works perfectly and the colors really
complement the whole environment.
And as the homeowner and the architect of the project that was extremely important for me.
I wanted to test out quite a lot of things in this house that I'm gonna use in our clients homes.
Clients always tell me like oh we should be able to shove stuff in and quickly close the doors.
So put a lot of effort in creating this back splash.
You can touch anywhere at the bottom of the upper cabinets and it goes down.
And now we've actually already used it into other projects.
Apart from this we have another very fun gadget in the kitchen.
We created this spice rack.
It has all our spices, our everyday knives, oils.
We also have a pot filler in it.
I just like everything within reach, I want it to be accessible when needed, so keeping a very clean flush look was important.
We selected this stove for this one very reason,
when you're not using it,
it's flush,
and when you're using it,
it comes up, and when you're done with it, you can just put it back in, and it's all easy to clean.
The whole aspect of the house was that it should be livable.
It was designed for our family.
So now we'll show you the basem*nt, but to get there, we're going to use the elevator, which is kind of like beaming.
from Star Trek.
So I want you guys to check out the room that are kids and my husband loved the most.
post.
Check it out.
So as you can see all the posters are specially picked for what our family likes.
It is the hub for our Friday Saturday movie watching time.
So this is my daughter's bedroom.
Put the girls share this room.
My youngest daughter, Alisha, she likes Harry Potter and she wanted us to create this hidden bookshelf.
So we've Hidden stare.
Hi girls.
So this is our girls' play loft.
So this is where we do a lot of artwork, a of puzzles.
The girls have their library hair.
There's a very fine line where you can appreciate architecture,
but you'll be like there is no way I can live in this place, it's like a museum.
And as soon as we started thinking about how we're going to be living in it, it started evolving into this warm, cozy feel.
I loved showing the house to all of you and I hope you guys had fun.
Before we even started the design process, I showed subs and diagrams.
One was built into the hillside, but it was contrasted with the second option, which was the more of the treehouse version.
You knew exactly what you wanted.
The way I The way I survived, the I husband's death was to be up in the trees of Great Falls.
So when I was ready to move out of the house where Mike died,
what I immediately looked for was a lot that was full of trees, right?
So I could get that feeling, that feeling of being in nature, which was so critical to my healing in those early days.
The first thing we did is to look carefully at the site at the various experiences that were possible and that meant thinking three-dimensionally not just about the ground plane,
not just about where you're walking on the ground, but what's up in the air.
Welcome to my tree house.
This place is my haven, my oasis and my work of art.
The experience walking into my home starts whenever you walk across a floating walkway.
That bridge-like entry is the first kind of moment of leaving the land, and you're also seeing nature, you sort of.
below that, almost like you're on a boardwalk in a nature preserve.
This is my great room.
One of the beauties of this room is you can see front to back and side to side the trees everywhere.
And also have this beautiful fireplace and my poet's corner all combined into this room.
What I love about this corner is that you can take a look at the entire view shed,
so that's a term that Robert, my architect taught me, where you're taking a look at the open space ahead of you.
She was very, very clear about what she wanted, but she never said what style.
And to me, that is actually the essence of modern.
It's not about style.
It's about addressing the actual nature modern.
And that's a form of freedom and that's a form of liberation.
This is my screen porch and this is a room that I spend so much time in all weekend long.
These screens are next level.
They're floor to ceiling with only a bifurcation in the middle for safety purposes.
They let you feel like you're outside.
So this room is a very much of a draw for when people come over, they want to spend time on the screen porch.
more so than anywhere else in the house, you feel in the trees.
You don't have that layer of glass.
It's just a little bit dangerous because you're up so high.
But safe.
That's by design.
Alright, here we are in the kitchen.
So the most beautiful feature of this kitchen are these windows.
These are spectacular.
The way that they wrap around and you can get a view of all the different kinds of trees outside.
And then on a personal note,
one of the parts of the kitchen that I love in the So Mike and I,
my husband at a prior house,
had a beautiful sink,
this Calista sink,
and so whenever we were designing this kitchen, I wanted to incorporate a little piece of the past into the present and the future.
Because we wanted to take advantage of that view,
there are no upper cabinets in this kitchen, so we had to think about how to make it functional.
And we solved that by creating a wall of vertical cabinets that have the refrigerator,
Basically, all the storage in one element that's very convenient to the island.
My true favorite room in my house is my office.
One of the biggest ways that I healed after the loss of my husband was reading,
right out of the gate I read the classic,
a year of magical thinking by Joan Didion,
and many others that So sometimes when I'm on a work call,
I'll just climb up on my couch and pull out a book that I think is appropriate for the person I'm talking to on a call.
I'll something an insight that I gained from one and I'll want to pull it out for someone.
Oh my gosh,
Dave Grohl,
the most hilarious,
awesome book but full of life lessons because people think that nobody He about loss,
but every single memoir I have here has an example of how someone has gotten through loss for Dave Grohl.
That was his Nirvana experience.
Here on the master bedroom level, you get to see the canopy.
So that's why I refer to this floor as my bird's nest.
I'm a bird tucked in the very top of the top.
trees.
Of course, we get to have the feeling of a floor to ceiling window consuming the entire room.
But when you look at it in reality, there is a space on either side.
So that space is designed to make the windows more economical that the window company can make them more
in their normal thresholds rather than it being completely custom.
There's a benefit, a cost benefit that we always look at.
So that extra inch, is it really worth, you know, $5,000?
You know, probably not.
And then also, you'll notice there are no shades on these windows.
I'm so high up, no one's seeing into them.
And in addition, it just makes me feel like I'm more in nature.
I'm an early riser, so I get up with the sun.
Sometimes my bed,
I watch the sun rise through the windows and watch all the colors of the sky and that's the way I like it.
When it came to designing this space here in the master bath,
I had lived 18 years of marriage with double sinks, so I kept telling Robert and Ben, well, no, we'll put two sinks in here.
And they kept looking at me very nicely and very kindly,
and didn't kind of want to point out that I was just a single person, and what would I need a double sink for.
So we had to come to Jesus'
moment where we were staring at the plans at their New York office,
and I finally had to really absorb the fact that I was a single person and a single sink would be great.
Is this style of architecture what Mike Deagle would have wanted?
No, but that's kind of the beauty of it.
I to express myself in it while knowing that whatever it would take for us to heal and move forward,
whatever it would take to support our lives, he would support.
One really precious precious thing to me is this letter that my husband wrote me.
Ten years, almost before he died, sweetheart, I was just thinking about how much I missed you.
Sometimes when I fly, I think about what would happen if I passed away, and you, Connor, and were without me.
I wonder.
Have I done all I can so that they will be?
If indeed something should happen,
know that all I would want for you all is to move forward with your lives, living them fully and happily, your devoted husband, Michael.
Oh, look.
I'm Carol Heraxing, and this is my home in Garrison, New I am a physician, and I live here with my dog, Olive.
I knew one day that I would live near the Hudson River, and about 12 years ago it became a reality.
I wanted something different, and I decided I was going to challenge myself and build a house, ground up.
I had all kinds of ideas in my head, you the architecture I fell in love with, Frank Lloyd Wright.
The mid-century modern style came in when I found Toshiko, the simplicity and the beauty of their homes and the balance with nature.
I say, okay, that's the architect.
The home is two stories.
The top floor part of it is cantilevered over the bottom.
We have 3,000 square feet here of living space.
Three bedrooms upstairs and each bedroom has its own bathroom.
I feel I have a personal responsibility to the environment.
Earth has a finite amount of resources and in addition to the geothermal system,
which is the main source of energy to heat and cool this house.
I also have two solar panels on the roof.
The flooring throughout the house is bamboo.
from forests that were sustainably harvested.
My bedroom is pretty basic and simple.
I keep it low tech.
I don't watch TV in there that's used mostly for sleeping and relaxation.
I never get out of my bed without saying my gratitude for having another great day
and then you walk out there and there's this beautiful bathroom and it gives great vibes.
When I take a bath, it's the most panoramic view I feel as if I'm outside.
The staircase leading from the first to the second floor is made up for months late.
the living room space on the first floor is this open awesome space that is the
heart of the house you know I sit there I read I meditate it's filled with
positive energy and it fills me with great joy it really integrates beautifully
with the outside you look through those doors and you want to go outside and you
want to explore yourself I am selling this home because I am entering a new chapter in my life.
There's a part of me that never want to leave this house.
I don't think I will find a place like this to replace it wherever I go, because there's a lot of me inside this house.
You We've built a summer camp for adults here.
The home shows that modern doesn't have to mean austere,
that it can also feel like a lake cabin and yet still perform like a really modern house.
Hi, welcome to our home.
I'm Lake Cleallam.
My name's Bill and I'd like to show you around.
Come on.
This home is really different from how we live in Seattle.
You're only an hour and a half away but it feels million miles away.
So when you first come into the home,
you're standing on the spot that my builder and I stood on and looked out when it was just an empty lot.
The home was built in what I call mid-century mountain architectural style.
It's about 7,700 square feet.
It has six bedrooms and sleeps about 30 people.
It really does function as a bit of a summer camp.
So this is the bunk room.
We have five singles and then we have four bunk beds.
Right now the kids all sleep in the bunk room but we were thinking maybe in 10 years you know they
have partners and want a private place to sleep so we have bedrooms for them and you know who
knows maybe a bunk room for grandkids one day.
I like it when there's a group of people up here and the house is performing like it should and you see people start really having fun.
That's it.
way to experience the house.
Let's go into the kitchen and I'll show you around.
You can see it's pretty industrial.
We have a lot of commercial appliances.
We wanted to make something that was really convenient to feed large groups.
So the centerpiece of the kitchen is this large concrete slab and, And anything this heavy has to be supported by something pretty strong.
So we used a reclaimed eye beam from our metal guys yard to build the base.
Similarly, the wood for the cabinets is from a 100 year old Seattle warehouse.
And as you can see, they're all book matched.
So the grain.
one's all the way through the cabinet faces.
Alright, well let's go downstairs.
Alright, so this is the record room, we call it the record room for probably obvious reasons.
It also functions as a dining room,
and as a political consultant by trade,
we host a lot of candidates and campaigns up here, so this functions as a war room too, where we can plot some strategy.
This is the living room,
oftentimes we have large groups, family, and it really provides kind of a comfortable space for everybody to get together in and talk.
things is our builder inset these markers that point to the various peaks that you
can see across the lake and it shows the name of the peak.
and the elevation of the peak.
Thomas Mountain is kind of directly over that way.
So, we have these large door systems that you can open, which we really enjoy.
Since we're kind of almost outside here, let me show you a few things.
You can see on the hillside that we have a large solar array,
and this is a little different from a lot of solar you probably see out there.
This is hot water solar.
So, instead of creating electricity and using that
to heat water, we decided we'd just use the sun to directly heat the hot water, which was a lot more efficient.
We have a little fire pit down here that people like to gather around at night.
The fire pit itself is made from an old propane tank.
We've really tried to incorporate local materials and salvage materials and then repurpose them in a cool way.
You'll see a lot of these, both inside and outside the house.
They're called gabions, which is a French word for a wire basket of rocks.
We use local salt.
They help keep snow off the house.
They help with like a brush fire resistance and they provide a little bit of animal habitat too.
So if you follow me in here, this is the Master Suite.
The master bedroom, just like the guest bedrooms, is pretty compact.
We really subscribed to the idea that in a vacation house you don't really want to stay in the bedroom.
So we made the bedroom small in the common spaces larger.
And if you come out this way, You'll see there's a, we have an outdoor shower.
It's kind of invigorating sometimes early in the morning.
You come out here and take a get to look out at the mountains and the lake really waisty up.
To me, good architecture is a place where people want to be and they want to have fun and it really improves their mood.
So thanks very much for coming and seeing our home today.
We really hope you have a good time and if you ever have a chance to come and explore the Central Washington Cascades,
we hope you do so.
See ya!
The house here is a late front property that's designed to welcome lots of friends and family to enjoy Western Colorado.
The property started as a place where we did camp and then it sort of evolved into a full
house that incorporates a year it's into the design.
It was by wanting to have the comforts of home, yet still enjoy the beauty of the outdoors and the camping life.
I think it's really high-end clamping.
Hahaha.
Hi, I'm Kristin.
Welcome to my lake house.
Come on in.
Interior square footage of the home I think is about 2,200 square feet and then with the exterior it's about 3,500.
The house itself has two bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms.
We start in the kitchen which is the central hub of the whole house and our house.
property.
At the sink you can really see all the outside of the property.
I have four kids and so when we were designing the house it was important for me to be
able to let the kids be outside but really being able to see them and make sure that they're safe.
My favorite detail of the kitchen was an expected surprise.
We chose the painted glass backslash in blue.
So even if you're sitting on the other side of the island you can still enjoy the view and see what's going on outside.
And then over here we have the living room here.
This is our main indoor space.
that features our living area plus the dining area.
It is inspired after a traditional yurt with the the round room and the skylight in the center.
I've had some great yurt experiences and they just have this amazing feel to them.
What I love about the round shape the room is it really is inviting and warm.
You really feel connected to the people around you and when you sit here on the couch in the center of the room you can enjoy the lake view and it's
situated in a way where you feel like you're floating on the water.
My house is composed of three different yurts, so we'll go to the next year, which is the master bedroom.
So another unique feature to traditional yurts are the way that the roof is built with
a rafters ceiling that lets in on lot of extra light both during the day and also on full moon nights.
And also if you look carefully at night you can see the stars.
So the third year in the house is a kids bunk room.
The main objective of this room is to sleep my four kids and as many of their friends.
friends as possible.
We have the four twin beds and then each bed has a trundle underneath that we can pull out.
So it sleeps eight.
A fun future of the house is a hidden loft space.
I can take you up there.
So this is just a fun additional indoor living space that gets used primarily by the teenagers
as they are hanging out space when the weather is not so great outside.
Now that I've shown you inside the house, I'd like to show you the outside which is where we spend most of our time.
The main idea behind the design of the house was to integrate indoor and outdoor living.
So we have our outdoor dining area, we have a full outdoor kitchen as well as an outdoor living room area.
So down here we have our dock and our boat house.
We probably spend 90% of our time out on the water in the summer.
We love the activity on the water, wake surfing, water skiing, paddle boarding, kayaking.
When we first acquired this property, we actually camped on it for a couple years before building.
And then when we We built the house we wanted to include that option for our friends,
and we built this little camping area for them.
We have a section of the property that's a little bit separate,
where we'd like to put up a couple yurts and set up a true glamping experience,
and then rent that out to other like-minded people.
who come down to Fruida to enjoy the biking and the hiking and the water sports.
Hey everyone, should take the opportunity to experience a year.
There's something special about being in a round space.
My architect actually described it once as feeling like a hug.
Thank you for coming.
I hope you enjoyed the lake house.
You
