英國建築師 Tony Fretton 為知名雕塑家 Anish Kapoor 打造其位於英國倫敦的私人住宅
英國建築師 Tony Fretton 為知名雕塑家 Anish Kapoor 打造其位於英國倫敦的私人住宅。
一樓平面圖 First Floor Plan
前庭及地下室平面圖
地面層平面圖 Ground Floor Plan
長向剖面圖 Long Section
出處：BD
A real work of art: Tony Fretton's house for Anish Kapoor
10 October 2008
By Ellis Woodman
Tony Fretton Architects' grand London house for artist Anish Kapoor reinvents the idea of domesticity
The number of houses built in London since the second world war that could truly be described as grand is not large, and those whose stylistic affiliations lie with the modern movement can be counted almost on the fingers of one hand.
James Gowan's Schreiber House of 1964 would be an early entry on any list, while Richard Rogers' 1987 remodelling of two Victorian houses in Chelsea for his own family might be considered a sufficiently comprehensive transformation to warrant inclusion.
Just around the corner from the Rogers' home, Tony Fretton completed the palatial Red House for a young art dealer in 2001. There is the large villa for two brothers that Jonathan Woolf built on the east edge of Hampstead Heath in 2003 — although strictly speaking it is a pair of semi-detached homes linked by a shared basement swimming pool — and in 2005 Caruso St John and Gianni Botsford both shoehorned substantial new homes into backlands sites in Notting Hill.
Many of these houses received a somewhat bewildered critical reception on their completion. When Gowan took the Smithsons around the Schreiber House, the best compliment they could muster was that it was very well built.
I am a fan of the house, but sympathise with the reaction. The terms of assessment one ordinarily brings to a work of architecture — does it, for example, demonstrate a sense of propriety and an economy of means? — can be entirely wrong-footed by a building conceived as an object of luxury or even as an outward manifestation of wealth and power. In 1964, rationing had only been suspended 10 years previously. The task of picturing how the other half live was not a straightforward one.
Half a century later, it remains a problem. I must confess that stepping into the very substantial house that Tony Fretton has recently completed for the family of the artist Anish Kapoor, I was beset by a similar deficiency of imagination. It is a building of evident beauty but also one that extends a considerable challenge to received notions of domesticity.
Seeing it in its unfurnished state, it was a struggle to imagine what kind of life would take hold when the family of four, their substantial art collection and live-in staff had taken up residence. What was clear was that it would be a life quite unlike that supported by most of London's houses, even those of comparable size. In his London: the Unique City (1934), Steen Eiler Rasmussen offers a perceptive description of the characteristic London house: 「The house itself is a small community... Each member has his own course marked out, and when he sticks to it he can live at his ease and the different members need not interfere with each other's affairs... It is especially easy to obtain the splendid isolation of the rooms in the English town house because the buildings generally are as narrow as possible and the rooms are therefore situated on several stories.」
If there was one central motivation behind the Kapoors' plan to build their own home, it was the wish to live in a less compartmentalised fashion than the house of Rasmussen's description would allow. In particular, they wanted a home focused around a very large, minimally differentiated volume — a space that could support multiple activities at once, that could could be used for entertaining on a grand scale and accommodate large artworks. They also, however, wanted to live centrally and the house they have built is a product of the inevitable conflict between those two desires.
「All locations in London where you might build a house are too small for what you are paying for them and for what you want,」 explains Fretton.
「What is interesting is where the client puts the emphasis with the programme. With the Red House, one of the client's relatives, who is an estate agent, advised him to have seven bedrooms. But he decided what he wanted was a very large room, and developers have subsequently said that was the right decision. It means a lot of the other accommodation pays a price for that, and so it was at the Kapoors' house.」
The limited number and relatively modest scale of the bedrooms wasn't the only compromise. There were few sites in central London that could accommodate the Kapoors' brief, so they had to settle for a backlands plot in Chelsea heavily constrained by the surrounding buildings.
Its address is to Old Church Street, but all that is visible from the road are two new sets of doors — one leading to the house, the other to the garage — in the ground floor openings of an Edwardian apartment building. The house extends to the rear in a strip 8m wide by 50m long.
Difficulties arose from the fact that there was no possibility of introducing light around the perimeter of the site, while the planners were resistant to any significant increase in height above that of the single-storey structure —an antiques showroom — that stood here previously.
However, as soon as we pass through the front door it is clear that the Kapoors have got what they were after: 50m away, we can just glimpse the back wall of the plot. While the intervening space demonstrates an unusually high level of transparency, it is differentiated principally through a series of adjustments to the section, and a pair of fully glazed lightwells.
Talking to Fretton, one senses that left to his own devices he would have articulated the space rather more finely. However, as he explains: 「Our impulse towards cosiness was not what our clients wanted. They wanted a tough space.」
The generous lobby introduces us to the material palette that carries across the entirety of the living areas. Floors are in honey-coloured Hopton stone, relieved in places by carpet-like inlays of Mandale, a grey, fossil-embedded stone that features prominently in the interiors of the Royal Festival Hall. Fretton describes Hopton as 「the stuff of classic modernist sculpture」. It was chosen in part for its reflective qualities in a space where daylight comes at a premium. That consideration also informed the choice of chunky stainless steel sections for all door frames and handrails.
From the lobby, a gentle ramp takes us down into the living space proper — the level drop enabling a suite of first floor bedrooms to be fitted within the permitted building envelope. The ramp extends down the side of the first of the lightwells, a star-shaped assembly in stainless steel-framed glass which reads rather as the inverse of the hothouse that stands on the roof of the Red House. As there, the form conjures a rich play of reflections, a quality that is particularly evident as we walk past it.
Fretton had envisaged the lightwell as a lushly planted space but the Kapoors opted for a floor of polished black granite. That feels like a misjudgement. With walls and ceilings painted entirely white, there is a gallery-like starkness to the living spaces that the presence of nature would go a long way towards mitigating.
Tucked behind the lightwell is the kitchen, while the dining area is sited on its far side, signified by a Madale inlay.
The axis of the entrance sequence is held by a flight of cantilevered concrete stairs leading to the first floor. A much briefer flight takes us down 1m into the living space, providing an increased floor-to-ceiling height. There is no balustrade to protect the level drop, but some judicious siting of furniture or sculpture can doubtless resolve what is otherwise a rather hairy transition.
On the first floor are two children's bedrooms — the only spaces enjoying views beyond the property's demise — and a small sitting room, providing a valuable alternative to the very particular pleasures of life on the lower storey. These spaces are configured around a courtyard with a glass floor. The structural grid supporting it has a coffer-like presence in the living area below and is animated by the light filtering through.
However, the living area's principal light source is the second lightwell at its far end. This one is planted and is about twice the area of its partner. We can walk all the way around the other one, but this is accessible only on three sides, giving it a less object-like presence.
Beyond lies the master bedroom which, like the other private areas of the house, is distinguished by a change of floor material, to oak. The room is elevated 1m above the living area by another brief flight of steps and, so isolated, suggests a pavilion-like relationship to the rest of the house. That sense is reinforced by the pitched roof capping it. Lifting the bedroom has also enabled the introduction of a narrow band of glazing directly below its floor level, thus providing clerestory lighting to a basement bathroom and dressing room.
A second basement, accessible from the entrance lobby, accommodates a windowless spa and suite of utility spaces, as well as two bedrooms lit only by glass blocks set in the pavement. It has to be said, the bedrooms are bleak. As guest accommodation, they will suffice, but as staff quarters they leave a lot to be desired.
And yet the challenge of reconciling what was a very lavish brief and a fantastically constrained site shouldn't be underestimated. There is an ease about the arrangement that conveys a sense of inevitability, but the history of the project suggests otherwise.
The Kapoors bought the site from a developer who had previously commissioned half a dozen very good practices to design schemes for it. None satisfied their requirements, so they approached both Fretton and Future Systems. After his office had won the commission, Fretton produced a series of options 「for putting everything everywhere」 — including, intriguingly, one in which the living accommodation sat on the first floor and the bedrooms on the ground.
If the scheme feels easy, it is an ease that has been hard won.
In response to the Kapoors' brief, it has a much less episodic character than most of the other projects designed for the site.
But Fretton has smuggled moments of differentiation and intimacy into his client's brave vision, nuances that may not have been part of the ideal home of their imagination but which I think they will soon recognise as critical to its livability.
Original print headline - The Kapoors at no 42
一樓平面圖 First Floor Plan
前庭及地下室平面圖
地面層平面圖 Ground Floor Plan
長向剖面圖 Long Section
出處：BD
A real work of art: Tony Fretton's house for Anish Kapoor
10 October 2008
By Ellis Woodman
Tony Fretton Architects' grand London house for artist Anish Kapoor reinvents the idea of domesticity
The number of houses built in London since the second world war that could truly be described as grand is not large, and those whose stylistic affiliations lie with the modern movement can be counted almost on the fingers of one hand.
James Gowan's Schreiber House of 1964 would be an early entry on any list, while Richard Rogers' 1987 remodelling of two Victorian houses in Chelsea for his own family might be considered a sufficiently comprehensive transformation to warrant inclusion.
Just around the corner from the Rogers' home, Tony Fretton completed the palatial Red House for a young art dealer in 2001. There is the large villa for two brothers that Jonathan Woolf built on the east edge of Hampstead Heath in 2003 — although strictly speaking it is a pair of semi-detached homes linked by a shared basement swimming pool — and in 2005 Caruso St John and Gianni Botsford both shoehorned substantial new homes into backlands sites in Notting Hill.
Many of these houses received a somewhat bewildered critical reception on their completion. When Gowan took the Smithsons around the Schreiber House, the best compliment they could muster was that it was very well built.
I am a fan of the house, but sympathise with the reaction. The terms of assessment one ordinarily brings to a work of architecture — does it, for example, demonstrate a sense of propriety and an economy of means? — can be entirely wrong-footed by a building conceived as an object of luxury or even as an outward manifestation of wealth and power. In 1964, rationing had only been suspended 10 years previously. The task of picturing how the other half live was not a straightforward one.
Half a century later, it remains a problem. I must confess that stepping into the very substantial house that Tony Fretton has recently completed for the family of the artist Anish Kapoor, I was beset by a similar deficiency of imagination. It is a building of evident beauty but also one that extends a considerable challenge to received notions of domesticity.
Seeing it in its unfurnished state, it was a struggle to imagine what kind of life would take hold when the family of four, their substantial art collection and live-in staff had taken up residence. What was clear was that it would be a life quite unlike that supported by most of London's houses, even those of comparable size. In his London: the Unique City (1934), Steen Eiler Rasmussen offers a perceptive description of the characteristic London house: 「The house itself is a small community... Each member has his own course marked out, and when he sticks to it he can live at his ease and the different members need not interfere with each other's affairs... It is especially easy to obtain the splendid isolation of the rooms in the English town house because the buildings generally are as narrow as possible and the rooms are therefore situated on several stories.」
If there was one central motivation behind the Kapoors' plan to build their own home, it was the wish to live in a less compartmentalised fashion than the house of Rasmussen's description would allow. In particular, they wanted a home focused around a very large, minimally differentiated volume — a space that could support multiple activities at once, that could could be used for entertaining on a grand scale and accommodate large artworks. They also, however, wanted to live centrally and the house they have built is a product of the inevitable conflict between those two desires.
「All locations in London where you might build a house are too small for what you are paying for them and for what you want,」 explains Fretton.
「What is interesting is where the client puts the emphasis with the programme. With the Red House, one of the client's relatives, who is an estate agent, advised him to have seven bedrooms. But he decided what he wanted was a very large room, and developers have subsequently said that was the right decision. It means a lot of the other accommodation pays a price for that, and so it was at the Kapoors' house.」
The limited number and relatively modest scale of the bedrooms wasn't the only compromise. There were few sites in central London that could accommodate the Kapoors' brief, so they had to settle for a backlands plot in Chelsea heavily constrained by the surrounding buildings.
Its address is to Old Church Street, but all that is visible from the road are two new sets of doors — one leading to the house, the other to the garage — in the ground floor openings of an Edwardian apartment building. The house extends to the rear in a strip 8m wide by 50m long.
Difficulties arose from the fact that there was no possibility of introducing light around the perimeter of the site, while the planners were resistant to any significant increase in height above that of the single-storey structure —an antiques showroom — that stood here previously.
However, as soon as we pass through the front door it is clear that the Kapoors have got what they were after: 50m away, we can just glimpse the back wall of the plot. While the intervening space demonstrates an unusually high level of transparency, it is differentiated principally through a series of adjustments to the section, and a pair of fully glazed lightwells.
Talking to Fretton, one senses that left to his own devices he would have articulated the space rather more finely. However, as he explains: 「Our impulse towards cosiness was not what our clients wanted. They wanted a tough space.」
The generous lobby introduces us to the material palette that carries across the entirety of the living areas. Floors are in honey-coloured Hopton stone, relieved in places by carpet-like inlays of Mandale, a grey, fossil-embedded stone that features prominently in the interiors of the Royal Festival Hall. Fretton describes Hopton as 「the stuff of classic modernist sculpture」. It was chosen in part for its reflective qualities in a space where daylight comes at a premium. That consideration also informed the choice of chunky stainless steel sections for all door frames and handrails.
From the lobby, a gentle ramp takes us down into the living space proper — the level drop enabling a suite of first floor bedrooms to be fitted within the permitted building envelope. The ramp extends down the side of the first of the lightwells, a star-shaped assembly in stainless steel-framed glass which reads rather as the inverse of the hothouse that stands on the roof of the Red House. As there, the form conjures a rich play of reflections, a quality that is particularly evident as we walk past it.
Fretton had envisaged the lightwell as a lushly planted space but the Kapoors opted for a floor of polished black granite. That feels like a misjudgement. With walls and ceilings painted entirely white, there is a gallery-like starkness to the living spaces that the presence of nature would go a long way towards mitigating.
Tucked behind the lightwell is the kitchen, while the dining area is sited on its far side, signified by a Madale inlay.
The axis of the entrance sequence is held by a flight of cantilevered concrete stairs leading to the first floor. A much briefer flight takes us down 1m into the living space, providing an increased floor-to-ceiling height. There is no balustrade to protect the level drop, but some judicious siting of furniture or sculpture can doubtless resolve what is otherwise a rather hairy transition.
On the first floor are two children's bedrooms — the only spaces enjoying views beyond the property's demise — and a small sitting room, providing a valuable alternative to the very particular pleasures of life on the lower storey. These spaces are configured around a courtyard with a glass floor. The structural grid supporting it has a coffer-like presence in the living area below and is animated by the light filtering through.
However, the living area's principal light source is the second lightwell at its far end. This one is planted and is about twice the area of its partner. We can walk all the way around the other one, but this is accessible only on three sides, giving it a less object-like presence.
Beyond lies the master bedroom which, like the other private areas of the house, is distinguished by a change of floor material, to oak. The room is elevated 1m above the living area by another brief flight of steps and, so isolated, suggests a pavilion-like relationship to the rest of the house. That sense is reinforced by the pitched roof capping it. Lifting the bedroom has also enabled the introduction of a narrow band of glazing directly below its floor level, thus providing clerestory lighting to a basement bathroom and dressing room.
A second basement, accessible from the entrance lobby, accommodates a windowless spa and suite of utility spaces, as well as two bedrooms lit only by glass blocks set in the pavement. It has to be said, the bedrooms are bleak. As guest accommodation, they will suffice, but as staff quarters they leave a lot to be desired.
And yet the challenge of reconciling what was a very lavish brief and a fantastically constrained site shouldn't be underestimated. There is an ease about the arrangement that conveys a sense of inevitability, but the history of the project suggests otherwise.
The Kapoors bought the site from a developer who had previously commissioned half a dozen very good practices to design schemes for it. None satisfied their requirements, so they approached both Fretton and Future Systems. After his office had won the commission, Fretton produced a series of options 「for putting everything everywhere」 — including, intriguingly, one in which the living accommodation sat on the first floor and the bedrooms on the ground.
If the scheme feels easy, it is an ease that has been hard won.
In response to the Kapoors' brief, it has a much less episodic character than most of the other projects designed for the site.
But Fretton has smuggled moments of differentiation and intimacy into his client's brave vision, nuances that may not have been part of the ideal home of their imagination but which I think they will soon recognise as critical to its livability.
Original print headline - The Kapoors at no 42
