What architect or artist's home do you think most compellingly mirrors the personality of its creator?

My favorite example is Le Corbusier’s Le Cabanon (1951) in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. How cool is it that the only building Le Corbusier made for himself (and his wife) was a 12 x 12′ log cabin? At the age of 64, the architect distilled his practice to its essence and created the place to which he would return every summer until his death in 1965 while swimming just offshore. For me, the Cabanon is an unexpected and magical self portrait of a late-career architect who has found perfect clarity.

Monday, January 9 at 5:19am

The first thing that popped int my mind is Cy Twombly’s home in Rome. The duality of the classical and the modern has hugely influenced contemporary taste.

Monday, January 9 at 9:20am

Frederic Church’s home Olana is a perfect example of a home that mirrors the creative genius of the owner. Church traveled to Ecuador, Jamaica, Newfoundland and the Middle East in search of magnificent scenery for his grand canvases. For his home he also selected carefully the landscape that would surround him. The property captures the most beautiful views of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River, and Church augmented the vista by carefully designing his property with clumps of trees, winding carriage roads and a lake that provide the perfect foreground. The arched and ornately decorated windows of the Persian-inspired house also serve as frames for both the property he orchestrated and the view beyond. Olana is a three-dimensional landscape painting.

Monday, January 9 at 4:00pm

I can’t resist being mischievous here and abandoning modernism (you will get plenty of those on this site, you don’t need me) to throw La Leopolda into the ring, the house Ogden Codman built for himself in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Riviera…Not far from Corb’s superb Cabanon, which Alex quite rightly mentions below.

It shows the power of architecture to seduce and destroy its obsessed creators (Codman went broke building it on land previously owned by King Leopold of the Belgians, thus the name); it is every inch a portrait of what he stood for as one of America’s greatest classical architects, and Edith Wharton’s collaborator on ‘The Decoration of Houses’; and it has stood the test of time in becoming an object of desire in every decade for people including the Windsors, Gianni Agnelli, Lily Safra and most recently the Russian who tried to buy it for 500 million euros and ended up losing his deposit.

I propose that the reason for this house having such continuous power to signify and seduce is not its fashionable position or view, but the quality of its design. At the turn of the century Ogden Codman stood for something as an architect no one but Horace Trumbauer came close to achieving: he was the purest interpreter of French Classicism since its birth in the 18th century. La Leopolda is his self-portrait and testament to that legacy, even if he never got to live there.

Monday, January 9 at 9:15pm

Artist’s houses are always the most interesting to visit or study. Two of my favorites are Sir John Soane’s house in London and Eliel Saarinen’s house called Hvittrask, outside Helsinki. As different as they are in time or concept, they both raise the level of the house to highly developed works of art. Soane was an avid collector at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, maybe even worthy of an episode of hoarders. He devised ingenious and humorous ways to highlight his vast collections of antiquities, paintings, sculpture and decorative accessories. He paid particular attention to the use of light and how to cary it throughout the different levels of a rather dark city house. There is no spot or corner left which does not bear the mark of his creativity and interest.

A century later, Saarinen spent a lifetime creating a beautiful country retreat and studio for himself and his family. The house with its surroundings and furnishings all reflect his tastes and designs at the dawning of the new 20th century. The result is a completely cohesive and satisfying portrait of this talented designer and architect – from the building and the gardens down to every last detail of hardware inside and out and all the furnishings. It was his anchor to his Finnish origins, and he returned there yearly, even after moving to America for his architectural career.

Just as these two house museums reflect their creators, the Glass House and compound as a whole is an incredibly interesting portrait of Philip Johnson’s entire life. When you go, after most probably knowing the house itself from pictures, you are totally taken with how much more there is to see and to try and understand. I found the landscape and myriad of outer buildings from different periods of the architect’s long creative life, equally as important a part of the entire picture as the renowned main house itself. I find it totally inspiring to look at places like these and to see how creative and brilliant artists actually lived. It beats visiting your typical robber baron’s opulent and too often garish house museum any day.

Tuesday, January 10 at 1:59pm

Thanks for the thoughtful responses, thus far – what a great range of personalities and residences to consider. In reading your vivid descriptions, I immediately think of how each of these figures ultimately saw himself in the big scheme of things. In regarding the charming simplicity of Le Cabanon to the extremely grand and comprehensive gesture that was Olana, I believe these houses certainly reflect more than just a stylistic sign of their respective times.

Great reference, David, to the destructive potential of architecture! A wonderful and passionate image of Codman as he tackled La Leopolda (a house that seems to still wield that same power!). And a well-taken point, Markham, how much more interesting it is to view the environments in which the creative talents lived as compared to their acquisitive clients.

Looking forward to more of your responses. These tales that reveal a creator’s psyche are fascinating to learn about, as is, as Miles indicated, the longer-term impact that their finished product has had on style and design.

Tuesday, January 10 at 6:39pm

This could potentially become a long list but I would first agree with Markham’s inclusion of Sir John Soane’s house and also add Erno Goldfinger’s Willow Road.

The Victorian painter GF Watts built a remarkable studio house and chapel in Compton, Surrey. This isn’t much to my taste, too fussy and complicated, but is nonetheless beautiful.

I admire and have even coveted Alvar Alto’s summer house on the island of Muuratsalo, Finland. I like the fact it was experimental where he played with different brick patterns, coursing and pointing. I like the brick paved courtyard with a fire pit in the centre and the childish romanticism of living on an island, even though it is now heavily developed and connected to the land by a road. I find it a building that is full of simple little details, that don’t always exactly please the eye but express what one would imagine to be the character of Alto.

Berthold Lubetkin’s own house at Whipsnade has similar appeal. Lubetkin, with the Tecton group, had already designed several buildings for the London Zoological Society. One of which was the Penguin Pond. This is now grade 1 listed and perhaps the building for which he is best remembered. This didn’t please him and when the RIBA awarded him their Gold Medal in 1982 he commented in his acceptance speech that he had wanted “to build homes for heroes but instead built a pond for penguins”. The quote isn’t exact but along those lines. In fact he built many ‘homes for heroes’ in post war London.

Lubetkin was born in Georgia and when in 1933, he was offered land at Whipsnade Zoo (also owned by LZS) he used the Russian word ‘dacha’ to describe the house, meaning weekend or holiday home. To my eye it is a spectacular little building. It is Modernist at its most stark with large horizontally divided windows and lots of sharp changes in plane and angles. It doesn’t even appear to sit on the ground securely. Lubetkin was very good at recording his thoughts whilst designing. About this building he said; “the designer admits that he has not capitulated to the accidents of a site that was forced on him; he excavated 800 yards of dazzling white chalk full of megalithic fossils to make a flat lawn and a flat house – where any Czech would have made a house in steps topped by a roof garden.” About three years later he built a second slightly smaller house nearby for Dr Ida Mann. This is another very interesting person, an ophthalmologist. She was the first female Professor at Oxford and a pioneer of contact lenses in the 1930′s.

One last place which has just come to mind is Chert near Ventnor on the Isle of White. Neither of the two ladies involved were artist nor architect, one being an engineer the other a chemist but they did design this as their own home. It is striking and unusual 1960′s modernist.

Wednesday, January 11 at 8:24am

It may seem trite to some or just too obvious, but I must throw Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello into the mix. Based on Vitruvian ideals, with Palladian forms heightened by French innovation and sophistication, all grounded by a distinctly American practicality, Monticello speaks most eloquently for the role of the educated amateur architect, whose focus is utterly singular and personal. Although self-described as an amateur, Jefferson pursued his career as an architect with all of the drive, creativity and scholarship of the best-trained minds. And, some may argue that his contribution to the field was as revolutionary and, in turn, as influential in America as his political writings. For more than fifty years, as his taste and design sensibility evolved, Jefferson fully shaped the entire property, taking total charge of the interior decoration, furnishing, and landscaping of his “little mountain” estate. The result, with the refinement of the Parlor and Dome Room balanced by the idiosyncrasy of sleeping alcove with ventilated closet above, is unmistakably Jeffersonian.

Thursday, January 12 at 12:10am

These are all wonderful examples, and I want to visit each one. I would still add a bit more to the Olana story – for me, one of the favorite quotes I remember from Church referred to his “painting by day and designing by night”, meaning designing every last detail of his house, whether it was the bannister to the second floor or the stencils on the door surrounds, ceiling arches, or doors themselves. The exuberance exhibited in these details helps to understand how Church was able to capture the imagination of America during the mid 19th century through his paintings — exuberance is infectious!

I also love Lord Frederic Leighton’s home – again, such a window into a time in Victorian London and into his personality, especially the Arab room with its rich, lavish details.

Friday, January 13 at 7:37am

Le Corbusier’s le cabanon addresses both modernism’s tendency toward systemization and man’s visceral longing for the often chaotic natural environment. It is as though he has taken his notion of the machine a habiter and collided it with a child’s tree house. It is by far my favorite of his works, if only because it is so personal.

Tuesday, January 17 at 1:01pm

Donald Judd’s homes in Soho and Marfa are amongst the most pure spaces I have ever experienced for the contemplation of art. They represent an intense and clear physical manifestation of his aesthetic. He believed deeply in the power of the dialogue between art and architecture and every detail in his spaces were considered and intentional. He was one of the first artists to move to Soho in the late 1960’s and the 5-story cast-iron building he purchased on Spring Street was used as a laboratory for exploring his ideas about the relationship of art and the built environment. To see the carefully placed magnificent collection of art of his peers (Flavin, Stella and Andre amongst others), alongside his own work is truly inspiring. This became the springboard for the much larger installations at Chinati.

Thursday, January 19 at 12:35pm

So many great examples here, I would like to add Frida Kahlo’s La Casa Azul, just outside mexico city. Walking thru that house, is such an experience, my words can not come close to expressing the experience. But her painting do…

Thursday, January 19 at 4:49pm

I remember once a discussion about the manner in which people dress. One person stated emphatically that they didn’t care at all how they looked – they weren’t interested in spending time or money on clothes and just put on whatever was easy and accessible. That was met by a quick and fervent rebuttal by someone else that claimed that, even if you don’t make conscious decisions about what you put on, you still are making a very deliberate choice. If you live exclusively in T-shirts and jeans, you are still selecting that color T-shirt over another one, or that image, logo, or text displayed across the front as opposed to another one in your pile. The jeans you threw on instead of another pair are that cut, are that faded, fit you that way.

In reading the responses to my question, I am thinking more and more of how very much an individual’s private space is such a telling reflection of one’s personality. This above account of the style of dress can just as easily be applied to one’s house. Architects and artists aside, budget and background aside, everyone makes choices, wittingly or not, about their most personal environments – and these choices tell others much more about us than we are sometimes aware or wish to admit.

Indeed, I am now regarding my own home in a much different light – attempting some self-analysis by revisiting every object in it!

Saturday, January 21 at 10:55am