Two amazing totally different homes...
Two interesting homes.. One small and made to play in and the other humungous and designed on Fire Island in New York by Richard Meier, a well known architect.
A set of lucky kids.. in a most amazing little house
One can only hope that the children of artist Jerome A. Levin will someday have a full understanding of how lucky they were. Levin, a father of three, has built a backyard house for his kids by employing the kind of careful consideration and meticulous attention reserved for full-sized contemporary homes—without extracting an iota of its child-like magic.
Levin, who trained as both artist and philosopher, sees great merit in small spaces—(“it enables you to think differently about your surroundings and your peers”)—and, not surprisingly, approached this 125 square-foot, year-long project in the backyard of his Long Island house from a perspective both esthetic and esoteric.
His self-titled “Metapod,” is deliberately ‘monastic,’ with furnishings edited down to a boat-like minimum, creating a serene, contemplative counterpoint to its lush and leafy garden setting. The house’s carefully chosen orientation affords the children (and their sleepover friends) bucolic views of the sun’s rising and setting, and plenty of uninterrupted internal space supremely “conducive to daydreaming.” Lucky kids.
A Richard Meier Fire-Island Home
It’s a measure of contemporary sizing standards—or just the tony circles in which Richard Meier travels—that a recently-designed 2,000 square foot beach house by the New York-based architect qualifies as ‘modest.’ By summer house standards, 2,000 square feet is a bit beyond modest, we think, but on New York’s pretension-free Fire Island, a barrier island with no inclinations to become the Hamptons, a house comprised of 25 tons of glass, and boasting 1700 square feet of decking is, no doubt about it, a very big deal.
But if there’s one thing Meier—who isn’t one to bother himself with pre-conceived notions about what any house should be—knows about, it’s how to go big. So it’s little wonder that the beach house he designed for clients who happen to be long-time friends, is a showstopper. Towering above the low-profile bungalows on the shoreline of an island conspicuously devoid of designer boutiques, and where residents saunter barefoot to local watering holes, Meier’s signature all-white, transparent cube of a house flies in the face of local architectural vernacular. But when a house is this ravishing to look at, maybe that little detail is wholly beside the point.
Hope you enjoyed the pics and post....
