Fashion, Art, Design, Lifestyle

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My Modern House: architect Jamie Fobert opens the door to the Victorian warehouse in Clerkenwell he converted in the early 2000s

https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/warehouse-in-clerkenwell-jamie-fobert-architect-my-modern-house

Architect Jamie Fobert is perhaps best-known for his work on blue-chip cultural venues, which have included extensions and refurbs to Tate St Ives, Kettle’s Yard and Charleston House, as well as the yet-to-be-unveiled redevelopment of the National Portrait Gallery. His residential roster is equally accomplished, ranging from the much-lauded Levring House in Bloomsbury to a comprehensive overhaul to a townhouse on King Henry’s Road in Primrose Hill.

Jamie’s own house, which he shares with his partner Dominique Gagnon, is located on the top floors of a Victorian warehouse building the couple developed in the early 2000s. Finding beauty in the building’s curved façade, tall ceilings and original features, Jamie set upon a light-handed refurbishment that installed contemporary living spaces into the existing structure. Here, he tells us how the project reflects his style of architecture, including why the messiness of a kitchen is, for him, always best left out of sight.

Jamie: “I think a house is a very specific thing, and it’s the root of all architecture. For thousands and thousands of years, there were houses, and probably some religious structures, long before anyone came up with another building type. It’s the most human, elemental need: shelter. And I think some of the most basic principles of what a house is have never changed. 

“There’s a wonderful text by Dom Hans van der Laan, a Belgian monk who built beautiful buildings. He wrote one of my favourite texts that says architecture should be like a sandal to a foot: just hard enough to withstand the rough ground and just soft enough to be comfortable. I think it sums up how I approach domestic spaces.

“Our practice is mostly known for its arts and cultural projects, but we’ve worked on lots of residential projects too. The difference between those spaces is how you occupy them, obviously. Designing someone’s house, you have to be very careful not to make it sensational, because a home is where people have to wake up every morning, somewhere where they have to come home to, where they have to be on a rainy day, where they have to be when they’re feeling ill and where they celebrate and entertain.

“Homes can have wonderful moments in them, but they also have to be places you can be in all day. Comfort and ease of use have to be primary. I get really irritated by houses that come across as architects just trying to show off.

“Also, you occupy the interior of a house much more than you ever experience the exterior. I think the interior as architecture is something which has been slightly lost. People seem to think that architecture is for the outside of buildings and the inside doesn’t really matter because you can just decorate. As a studio, we always design houses from the inside.

“We spent years looking for an empty site like this in London – they’re quite hard to find. We found this Victorian warehouse and the minute we walked in and saw the space that is now our living room, my immediate feeling was that I could just live in this room alone. The building already had all of those things that I respond to as an architect.

“We bought it and managed to get planning to convert it into two flats and office space. We didn’t have to make any grand architectural moves because they were here already, in the original design. In fact, the difficulty was finding ways to not ruin what was already here. A lot of the design was about ensuring we didn’t break up the original façade.

“The height of the ceiling and the timber (even though it had been painted and water-stained), the windows, the amount of light, the loading bay doors, the curving façade: the building is already beautiful, built probably by an engineer, some Victorian builder who just did the simplest thing.

“But, in a way, the process was the same as when we’re doing a new build. You decide what the important views are, the way rooms face to get certain light, what kind of volumes you want to have, then you figure out how to link them, and make them functional, comfortable and liveable.

“One of the things I appreciate about this house is that it’s incredibly nice to be by yourself here. It’s nice for two as well, and you can have 100 people downstairs – it’s just always comfortable.

“Another thing I really like, which I push for a lot in projects, is that the kitchen is hidden away but connected. I don’t want to be in a kitchen and not hear the conversation going on, but I’m also an incredibly messy cook, so I want that out of sight.

“People are always thinking you need to have the dining room next to the kitchen – why? I like what we have here, where the kitchen, living and dining rooms are all separate from each other but it’s one architectural space. I get really tired of these big spaces in which the kitchen is just sort of sitting there in the middle.

“If I was to do this project again now, I think it would look almost exactly the same. It was all about allowing the quality of the existing fabric to take centre stage and any additions we made couldn’t strike against that.

“We did change the kitchen a few years ago, though. We had just finished our summer house in Galicia, northern Spain, where we used chestnut, the local hardwood for all the joinery. We sent the drawings of the kitchen to the carpenters in Porto and they drove here with all the pieces, including the single piece of stainless steel that forms the worktop and sink.

“There are a number of pieces made in black steel here, which is a material we used in an exhibition in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern called The Upright Figure in 2002. We also designed some stools made from it for the Architectural Association, which we have prototypes of here, and we used it to make our bespoke dining table that reflects the curve of the building.

“I love black steel for its colour and materiality. I ask the fabricators to leave the weld marks coming through, so the making process is visible. In a way, it’s not trying too hard. But I think it’s quite important that if the design is done in this quite logical way, it also has to have something poetic about it. It has to be a combination because it can’t all just be dry and functional. You allow yourself to be quite whimsical momentarily, within an overall very calm environment.

“I think what I learnt here and have carried to my other projects is that the secret to domestic architecture is making people feel at ease. If you go to a public space, that can be quite exceptional because it’s an experience that won’t last longer than a couple of hours at most. But if it’s your home, it has to be somewhere you feel comfortable, and part of our jobs as architects is working out how to give that to clients.

“One of the first houses we ever worked on was an extension to a psychoanalyst’s home in Hampstead. At the end of the four-year project, he said it was the closest thing he’d ever experienced to the process of being analysed. You work incredibly closely for four years, speaking at least every day about the most intimate details of their lives, and then it stops.

“The process is very overwhelming for some people, because making choices is overwhelming. And that’s what architecture is: a chain of choices and decisions. The unsuccessful projects are where you can see all the different questions answered independently. The successful projects are the ones where those million questions end up with a single answer, just expressed in multiple ways.

“I read an interview with Bridget Riley, the painter, in which she said that when she starts a painting, she’s setting out certain criteria, things she wants to achieve. She has an idea of what it should be, but she said she knows the painting is going to be good at a certain moment when she no longer is making the decisions, the painting is.

“I knew exactly what she meant. There’s a certain point where the house tells you what you should do. It becomes the decision-maker. It’s not you. It’s not the client. It’s the house itself, because for it to become a singular home, there is only one answer for each those questions. I think that happened here – it was the integrity of the Victorian building that made the decisions.”

What do you think it means to live in a modern way?

“To be comfortable and relaxed in your home. A place where light, volume and materiality are all present and calming. To know every object in your house; where it came from, who made it, what memories it holds. To have only objects that are beautiful (in their own way) and which have meaning for you.”

Is there a house on The Modern House website that’s caught your eye?

“Far too many!”

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Rubik’s Cube House’: architects Katy Woollacott and Patrick Gilmartin's family home in Hampstead

 

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Chronicles of Modernism: the enduring legacy and humanity of Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower

https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/erno-goldfinger-trellick-tower-chronicles-of-modernism

In this series, we’re telling the story of British modernism, and have so far taken in the work of Peter Womersley, Maxwell Fry, Wells Coates and Walter Segal. Here, we’re exploring Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, a symbol of London’s brutalist legacy in west London.

Up until recently, and to an extent still today, brutalist architecture had the reputation of an impractical in-joke: a grotesque design experiment whose conceptual form is far removed from the needs of the people that actually have to inhabit it. Indeed, Trellick Tower’s record in the late 1970s and early 1980s did nothing to alter this perception, as the social housing project fell into neglect and crime, earning the moniker ‘The Tower of Terror’. The public, rather than attributing these failings to the local council, pointed to the architecture instead: the building became a ‘pathetic fallacy’ of sorts; its grey and dominating form conducive to anti-social behaviour.

This, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. Brutalism (the name derives from the French for raw concrete: béton brut) developed from the modernist movement of the 1920s, whose ethos lay in utility: design that would improve human lives. And while appearances evolved, this core principle remained constant.

Trellick Tower’s architect Ernö Goldfinger belonged wholly to this school of thought. The Hungarian designer had trained in Paris in the 1920s and was strongly influenced by modernism’s godfather, Le Corbusier, whom he briefly met. The latter’s 1927 essay collection Vers une architecture proved particularly influential on the young Goldfinger. Totally breaking from the florid, art-for-art’s-sake approach of 19th-century design, it bluntly asked questions both philosophical – where do space and man meet? – and practical: how can we design builds that are easy to clean? When Goldfinger moved to the UK in the 1930s, he quickly set about exercising these novel, architectural ideals.

It wasn’t easy. Britain then was still languishing in the baroque clunkiness of Victorian and Edwardian styles. Modernist structures, such as Wells Coates’ Isokon Building in Belsize Parks, were going up, but these were private, experimental commissions. Goldfinger eventually had to resort to private means too and, despite some local opposition, produced 1-3 Willow Road: a row of terraced houses in Hampstead where he lived throughout his life. Despite its small size, it was – and remains – an exemplary exercise in modernist architecture, with emphasis on spacious interiors, natural light and practical materials. Still, Goldfinger’s vision was to apply this rubric on a grander, public scale. After all, that’s what it was intended for.

His opportunity came with the end of the Second World War. German bombing had destroyed or damaged some two million homes, meanwhile the population was booming thanks to a sharp rise in immigration as Britain sought labour to rebuild the country. The London council, faced with a housing crisis, eventually came round to modernists like Goldfinger, who promised quality, affordable and humane design solutions.

These post-war decades proved prolific for modernism. The large-scale, affordable and pre-fabricated possibilities of concrete were irresistible. From the Bodleian Law Library in Oxford to the Spa Green Estate in Finsbury, modernist buildings were springing up across the country. High-rises in particularly were in vogue: they offered tenants privacy, could house large numbers and saved valuable horizontal space for parks, shops, roads and so forth. Goldfinger himself worked on two major multi-stories in the 1960s: the Metro Central Heights and Balfron Tower.

Yet by the time Trellick Tower went up in 1972, high-rises and brutalism were losing traction. Concrete, if poorly looked after, can turn a dirty brown-grey and Londoners soon found the style an eyesore in such abundance across the capital. Even the National Theatre, when it opened in 1976, proved far from popular, with Prince Charles comparing it to a nuclear power station. But these qualms were purely aesthetic and largely misplaced. The need for modernism as a practical tool for advancing society was still there. So although Trellick Tower arrived unfashionably late, it was a timely and salient response to the socio-economic demands of the city.

The 31-floor high-rise is by no means revolutionary, but it is exceptional, showcasing the best ideas from 50 years of tried-and-tested modernism. Some of the design traits are an improvement on Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, where the architect briefly lived with his wife in order to understand the building more personally. The couple even hosted rather lavish parties, inviting residents to give feedback on the architecture over a glass of champagne.

The building is split into the main block of flats and the imposing service tower. To maximise living space, Goldfinger moved all the logistical aspects of the design – lifts, stairs and even communal laundrettes – into the latter. The heating system and water tanks are housed here too, in the plant room at the top, which allows water to simply run down to apartments using gravity, minimising piping. Similar spatial and salutary concerns are evident inside the apartments. Windows are pushed to their largest dimensions for ample natural light; many of the doors slide rather than swing; extra space is ceded to a balcony.

The genius of Trellick Tower is that it is – one hopes Goldfinger will forgive the use a 19th-century term in a modernist context – a Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art. The architect, rather than simply laying out a masterplan, applied himself to every aspect of the building: whether it’s double-glazed window panes for greater soundproofing or light-switches integrated into door frames for a less cluttered look. This is because Goldfinger was concerned with the day-to-day lives of people. He wanted design to make their lives easier and happier.

It was doubtlessly difficult for the architect to watch as his prized design became tarnished in the public eye and synonymous with crime and poverty. These problems weren’t resolved until around the time of Goldfinger’s death in 1987, when the building secured a Grade II* listing and a new residents’ association managed to get the local council to install the main-door locks, concierge and security cameras that Trellick Tower so needed, largely addressing safety issues.

Brutalism has gained renewed appreciation in the last decade and Trellick Tower has drawn particular attention, chiefly because the ideas that it espouses – simplicity and efficiency of space; the value of community; the sheer beauty of vertical living – remain as important as ever in an ever-expanding 21st-century London. We can’t all live in Trellick Tower, but we can take valuable lessons from it, because Goldfinger understood and responded to people, to the urban environment, in a way that few designers ever could. As the architect Sand Helsel put it, standing on one the tower’s balconies in 1991: “From here… I can appropriate a bit of the city, and yet, as an individual, I know I’m part of something larger. I can celebrate the mass of humanity, even in concrete.”

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DR MARTENS

1460 Black Snowplow WP

https://se.zoovillage.com/dr-martens/1460-black-snowplow-wp

Get ready for winter with this fleece-lined 1460 boot for men. The boot combines classic Docs DNA with high-performance protection against cold and has the new DMG WinterGrip knurled sole for superior grip and durability on slippery winter surfaces. The shoe is also made of Snowplow, a grain- and salt-resistant, water-resistant leather that is easy to clean.

Fleece-lined boot
8-hole lacing
High-performance DM's Wintergrip sole for extra grip.
Made with Snowplow
Classic Doc DNA: knurled edges, visible seams and heel flap

 

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Nike ISPA Zoom Road Warrior

https://footdistrict.com/en/nike-ispa-zoom-road-warrior-cw9410-400.html

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

 

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COLETTE MON AMOUR - THE ENCORE

https://www.highsnobiety.com/c/colette-mon-amour-the-encore/

After a series of global premieres in Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo, our documentary COLETTE MON AMOUR will be available to watch at home on-demand from December 20. To commemorate the occasion we’re releasing a final capsule of celebratory products. The long list of collaborations includes a Saint Laurent Rubik’s cube, a Thom Browne embellished tuxedo, a wooden LEGO figurine, something shiny from Advisory Board Crystals, CLOT graphic garments, and more. But don’t let these names distract you from the pieces from our in-house label, which were designed to become your new closet staples.

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ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

OVERSIZED SNEAKERS WITH HEART PRINT

https://hbx.com/women/brands/alexander-mcqueen/oversized-sneakers-with-heart-print

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New Amsterdam Surf Association Cover Cardigan

https://nitten.nl/new-amsterdam-surf-association-2021055-clothing-knitwear-421500713

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ZIMMERMANN

Lovestruck floral-print dress

https://bungalow.store/en/women/clothing/dresses/90634/9718dand/natpf?c=187

 

 

 

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ULLA JOHNSON 

Brown silk stretch floral print flared dress

https://bungalow.store/en/women/clothing/dresses/89872/fa200116/noido?c=187

 

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6 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

it's a really nice house (obviously) but a wee bit too old womanly for me (and she is only 25, lol)

I really think a tonne of that house is her mum

at least she sounded somewhat intelligent as well ('structurally renovated' used correctly)

I do love that long passageway and the painting room

do not, however, like the glam room, gag

and kudos for purging her closet regularly (I need to stop slacking on that, lol)

finally, hats off for her not going all ghetto ghetto bling bling Cribs shite (even if her style is different from mine, I would so takes hers all day long over that crap)

good video

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END. X NEW BALANCE 'RAINBOW EUCALYPTUS' - MADE IN ENGLAND

https://launches.endclothing.com/

THE RAINBOW EUCALYPTUS’ NAMESAKE IS INDIGENOUS TO THE PHILIPPINES AND INDONESIA, AND IT’S CHARACTERISED BY ITS UNIQUE VIBRANT BARK

END. and New Balance’s most recent collaborations have all had avian influences, but for their latest 1500, they look to the rainforests of Southeast Asia for inspiration. The Rainbow Eucalyptus’ namesake is indigenous to the Philippines and Indonesia, and it’s characterised by its unique vibrant bark. Mimicking that, the pigskin suede upper features contrasting rainbow hues that continue onto the sockliner, creating a pattern reminiscent of the tree’s colourful trunk. ENCAP® technology remains underfoot — in keeping with the model’s athletic heritage — and it’s packaged in a bespoke, eucalyptus-scented box for an extra hit of jungle tranquillity.

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LOUIE

Glam gumbo

Louie, in the multi-floor venue that used to be Joël Robuchon, has all the trippings of a hit – hard to book tables, secret bar, decadent but comfortable decor, a lot of ex-Chiltern staff – but they also serve caviar, oysters, grilled lobster with Creole butter, and grits and gumbo for brunch, which is a nice change.

Louie

 

OFFICINA 000

Breakfast pasta

Yes, that’s right. Pasta is not just for lunch/dinner, as proven by Officina’s menu of Bergese carbonara (pasta filled with runny egg yolk, bacon, and onion) and breakfast bruschetta (cured salmon topped with stracciatella and pink peppercorn and chilli fried eggs with padron pepper). There’s also ravioli for dessert – a sweet, fried version and a cacao with ricotta one served with poached pear and cinnamon.

 

Officina 000

FLOR

Borough

It comes as no surprise that Flor, which is run by the co-founders of Michelin-starred Lyle’s, has an innovative brunch menu. Highlights include a smoked eel and sourdough waffle with black figs; mozzarella in carrozza with fried egg and bottarga; baghrir pancake, apple butter with anthotyros; sausage and collard phyllo pies; and turmeric rice, smoked trout and a soft egg. And if you didn’t have to look up any of those ingredients, you’re doing better than we are.

Flor

BOB BOB RICARD

Short and sweet

To get this one, you’ve got to be quick. On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Bob Bob Ricard in Soho has a waffle and bellini hour (11am-midday), where they have sweet and savoury waffles with either a glass of Champagne or a strawberry/peach bellini. This isn’t a discounted hour (dishes are priced separately), but it is a happy one.

Bob Bob Ricard

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

9 hours ago, Vesper said:

it's a really nice house (obviously) but a wee bit too old womanly for me (and she is only 25, lol)

I really think a tonne of that house is her mum

at least she sounded somewhat intelligent as well ('structurally renovated' used correctly)

I do love that long passageway and the painting room

do not, however, like the glam room, gag

and kudos for purging her closet regularly (I need to stop slacking on that, lol)

finally, hats off for her not going all ghetto ghetto bling bling Cribs shite (even if her style is different from mine, I would so takes hers all day long over that crap)

good video

She is the only likeable person from Jenner/Kardashian family for me. And cutest 

Nicole from Pussycat Dolls and Dakota Johnson also have interesting houses.

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PAPER PLANES

Established in 2008, Paper Planes is designed by the Head of Lifestyle at Roc Nation, Emory Jones. The streetwear brand combines street fashion, music and design into one and is known for providing their signature headwear and t-shirts.  The brand is easily recognized by their signature black and white paper plane logo made out of a black and white American flag. Their signature logo represents imagination and the thought of mentally getting somewhere before physically getting there.  In 2018, Jay-Z filed for trademark for Paper Planes and has since been turned into a full fledged stand alone brand.

 

https://feature.com/collections/paper-planes

 

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STORY MFG.

 

KEEPING JUMPER

MOONLIGHT MUSHROOM

https://eu.goodhoodstore.com/products/story-mfg-keeping-jumper-moonlight-mushroom-womens-aw20

PEACE PANTS
BARK MFG CAMO

https://eu.goodhoodstore.com/products/story-mfg-peace-pants-bark-mfg-camo-womens-aw20

 

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SB Dunk Low x Sean Cliver

Holiday Special Special

https://www.nike.com/gb/launch/t/sb-dunk-low-sean-cliver-holiday-special