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Fore word
“Paradise Found” features a stunning array of residential design, from a simple dwelling to a luxurious home set in a spectacular landscape. Readers are invited to enjoy the appeal and meaning of enviable dwellings. Bringing together a diverse and fascinating selection of homes with sophisticated color combinations, outdoor rooms, great design objects, and open areas for relaxing, this book brings their colors and elegantly easy-going ambience to life. The private residences featured in “Paradise Found” boast a rich variety of different architecture and interior styles, but they all share a similar spirit. Fusing traditional European design with Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, the resulting unique homes reflect a keen sense of style. Whatever the style, their interiors speak of a relaxed, informal, carefree lifestyle where the boundaries between inside and out are blurred. Focusing not only on the architecture of the buildings but also the landscape design and interior design, “Paradise Found” transcends the traditional and details an inclusive look at some of the most stylish and diverse homes. Frequently elegant and uncluttered, the houses serve as models of smart and beautiful design with lots of ideas for homeowners who do not necessarily live in a tropical climate, but who wish to have something of that appeal and sensitivity in their own home. Featuring full color photography, “Paradise Found” visits a selection of glorious houses and hideaways that are guaranteed to enchant and inspire.
Wim Pauwels Publisher
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Right page: The Chandigarh chair by Pierre Jeanneret is a mid-century design created specifically for Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India’s utopian capital city as part of Swiss architect (and Jeanneret’s cousin) Le Corbusier’s larger urban scheme. The combination of modernist and traditional design in the Chandigarh chair seems highly appropriate in this house, which is an African melding of ancient and modern influences.
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UNFOLDING SEQUENCE O F S PA C E S
This pure white off-the-grid holiday home in the pristine natural mountainside and bush inland from Plettenberg Bay in South Africa is built to celebrate its spectacular clifftop views. When you arrive at this low-slung, ground-hugging white holiday home just inland from Plettenberg Bay, its greatest asset remains invisible. In fact, the spectacular clifftop views the home commands from its rocky, clifftop promontory have been deliberately obscured. As you cross the raised meadow of waving grasses from your point of arrival, the house forms a screen of sorts. It’s all part of what its architect, Christiaan van Aswegen, calls a “an unfolding sequence of spaces” or “architectural tantra”, a carefully choreographed progression as you arrive. From the meadow, you pass a pool and descend a few stairs onto a deck. “Then the surroundings really disappear because you are surrounded by the white walls of the house,” says Van Aswegen. “The idea was that there would be a compression of space, a closing off. Only once you enter the house do you get a glimpse of the view beyond, and then as you work your way towards the deck in front, it just expands and blows your mind.” The house belongs to South African-born British investor Julian Treger, a well-known collector of design and art. “The landscape falls 1000 feet and you have caves and birds below you,” continues Treger. “Sometimes you wake up and the cloud level is below the house.” There isn’t another building as far as the eye can see, and indigenous fynbos covers the meadows and ravines as they fade from view into layer upon layer of the receding Tsitsikamma mountains.
The long, low monolithic form of the White House, as it has been dubbed, means the house “hugs the ground” as its owner, South Africanborn British investor Julian Treger puts it.
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In the dining area, the Tom Dixon Pylon Table is surrounded by diamond chairs by Harry Bertoia, both designs using welded steel in interesting and influential ways. The chandelier is by Gaetano Sciolari. On top of the table, the Spin Candelabra is also by Tom Dixon. On the sideboard is a sculpture by Edoardo Villa, who was an Italian prisoner of war during WW2, and who stayed in South Africa afterwards, adding to the European-African theme that runs throughout the art collection in the house.
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PUBLISHER BETA-PLUS publishing www.betaplus.com DESIGN Polygraph’ – Nathalie Binart
EAN 9782875500465 © 2018, BETA-PLUS All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means. Printed in Belgium.
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