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Jens Risom’s Retreat

These are just a few of the images taken from a really great short film for DWELL on Danish mid century furniture designer and Co-Founder of Knoll Furniture Company Jens Risom‘s pre-fab vacation home. Designed by the designer himself back in 1965, the home still sits on Block Island, a beach town a ferry ride away from Narragansett, Rhode Island.

Watch the film here and listen to Jens reminisce about the how the the simple A-frame structure, which is still in use by his children and grandchildren, was built by a three-person team from a Massachusetts prefab home company.

~images via fast co. design

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Coast Modern Film

 

Coast Modern is an independent documentary by directors Mike Bernard and Gavin Froome. Travelling along the Pacific North West coastline from LA to Vancouver, the film showcases the pioneers of West Coast Modernist Architecture, and the homes that have become their legacies. Stepping inside the most inspired dwellings on the west coast, we feel how the light and space of a classic Modernist home can work in collaboration with the natural environment. Dion Neutra tells us that the way to live is to have ‘the comfort of being inside, yet you have the feeling of being outside’, and it is this established principle that contemporary Modernist architects are emulating and evolving.

This relaxed journey takes us across three generations of Modernist architecture, all finding beauty in their own times, and all taking us back to the basics of true living – a sense of place, light, and a deep connection to the earth. Interviewed in Coast Modern are some of the most respected names in architecture, including James Steele, Barbara Lamprecht, Ray Kappe, Hernik Bull, Pierluigi Serraino, Michael Folonis, Dion Neutra, Douglas Coupland, John Cava, Barbara Bestor and legendary photographer Julius Shulman. ~coastmodernfilm

Watch the trailer for film here.

~Thanks wallpaper magazine!

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Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel

 

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel is an intimate portrait and a vibrant celebration of one of the most influential women of the 20th century, an enduring icon whose influence changed the face of fashion, beauty, art, publishing and culture forever. During her fifty year reign as the “Empress of Fashion,” she launched Twiggy, advised Jackie O and coined some of fashion’s most eloquent proverbs such as “the bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb.” She was the fashion editor of HARPER’S BAZAAR where she worked for 25 years before becoming editor in chief of VOGUE followed by a remarkable stint at the Met’s Costume Institute where she helped popularize its historical collections. 

In theaters in Los Angeles & New York September 21.

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Houses of the Sundown Sea

text by Lisa Germany with accompanying photos by Juergen Nogai

Gesner himself at his 1957 designed Wave House in Malibu

Wave House

Raven’s Eye in Malibu

For more than 60 years, passersby have strained to catch a glimpse of maverick architect Harry Gesner’s houses in Southern California. This is the first book to examine Gesner’s architecture, tracing his career from 1945 to the present and opening the doors to 15 of Gesner’s intriguing homes, all located in or near Los Angeles and built in the 1950s and 1960s. An insightful and revealing text accompanies new photography by Juergen Nogai along with historical photographs and Gesner’s own drawings, floor plans, and blueprints drawn from his remarkably rich archive. Gesner’s utterly unique, often eccentric and unorthodox designs are outside the canons of doctrinaire modernism, yet he is undoubtedly a Modernist, and one whose romantic, quixotic nature has caused his truly extraordinary body of work to be overlooked by many—until now. ~via Amazon

Harry Gesner draws inspiration from nature and the energy of having lived by the ocean in Malibu all his life. Gesner, an avid surfer, whose Malibu Wave House has given inspiration to such architectural icons as the Sydney Opera House, describes his experience in 1956, sketching the ideas right onto his balsa-board with a grease pencil, sitting out in the ocean facing the beach where he camped for a few nights to get to know the elements. ~Eric Minh Swenson

 

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GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

This looks amazing and out March 14th in NYC.  GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING captures Germany’s most celebrated contemporary artist at work with his squeegee.

“It’s pointless to talk about painting.” — Gerhard Richter (1965). Richter, considered one of the world’s greatest living painters and now nearly 80 years old, agreed to talk about his work, as a small film crew documents his creative process. Blunt, provocative, unashamedly curmudgeonly and iconoclastic (but never cynical), the artist says he’s “interested in things he doesn’t understand,” that “painting is a secretive business,” and that “each painting is an assertion that tolerates no company.”~filmforum.org

 

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Mad Love for Morocco

 
Majorelle Garden via moroccotravelblog
Villa Oasis –Lisl Dennis/”Living in Morocco,” Thames & Hudson via NYT
Villa Mabrouka via swide.com
Villa Oasis –Lisl Dennis/”Living in Morocco,” Thames & Hudson via NYT
via aestheteblog
Villa Oasis –Lisl Dennis/”Living in Morocco,” Thames & Hudson via NYT
via aestheteblog
photo by Ivan Terestchenko © 2009 courtesy of The Vendome Press, New York
This post was inspired by another movie I watched the other night, “L’Amour Fou,” a documentary about Yves Saint Laurent, the French couturier, narrated by Pierre Bergé, his partner in business and in life. You see, I haven’t really seen many movies since my son was born 3 1/2 years ago and we JUST got Netflix over the holidays, so you could say I’m catching up on MY viewing pleasure.

I LOVED this movie. It was full of amazing imagery; Yves Clothing of course, hanging with Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger & the likes from the 60s and 70s, the incredible collection of objects d′art which in 2009 sold at Christiesfor $484 Million, and the fabulous homes that Yves and Pierre owned. I’m totally fascinated by the ones they owned Morocco, 3 in total. Dar es Saada and *The Villa Oasis were both decorated by Bill Willis and Jacques Grange designed Villa Mabrouka.  *Both designers collaborated on Villa Oasis.

I found a great article in T Magazine on decorator Bill Willis here and another– The Things Yves Loved  on Vanity Fair.
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The Other Glass House

I thought I would stay on the subject of movies and post a few pics of the glass house located outside Stockholm, Sweden and featured in the movie The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.  I did get to see this movie over the holidays and thought it was pretty good as well.
According to Curbed.com the director declined “to include the swimming pool out front, and fog obscures the view in a few scenes.  The house had been lingering on the market for the indie-film budget of $5.62M for a while, but very well may have sold since the movie was released-the listing was pulled from the Southeby’s Stockholm website just last night”.  

~images via curbed


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Vidal Sassoon : : Neutra’s Singleton House

This weekend I was able to watch Vidal Sassoon the Movie and really enjoyed it.  The movie explores the life and legacy of the most influential hairdresser in the world, whose influence far outreaches the industry he changed forever.  
 
“My whole work, beginning in the late 1950s, came from the Bauhaus,” Sassoon explains in Architectural Digest. “It was all about studying the bone structure of the face, to bring out the character. Architects have always been my heroes,” he adds.
After hearing how architecture influenced his work as a hairdresser it seems only natural that he would of course live in an architectural gem of a home (one of my favorites). In the movie there are glimpses of the famous 1959 Richard Neutra’s Singleton House that he and his wife renovated after purchasing it in 2004.  Last year Architectural Digest featured the Bel Air home in its April issue with the pictures shown above.
God, I can smell the Almond scented Shampoo and Conditioner that I used in the 80s so clearly right now.
~images via architecturaldigest.com
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Down Time

Things have been a little crazed over here and will be until my husband’s 50th birthday which is next week and Christmas is over.  I’m looking forward to a little down time and hopefully squeezing in a few movies that have been on my list.

Can you recommend any others I should see?