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Thinking outside the box: Skywood
United Kingdom Architecture News - May 02, 2014 - 14:25 5383 views
The rooms have no sliding doors, only frameless glass panels to maximise the view Picture: Nigel Young/Foster + Partners
A regular fixture in adverts and movies, Skywood House now has its own monograph. Albert Hill explores the enduring appeal of this modernist masterpiece
Graham Phillips lives in a retirement bungalow in the suburbs, wedged between the M25 motorway and an airport. Although it might not sound like much, the house Phillips designed and built for himself is actually one of the most lusted-after examples of modern architecture in the world, a magnet for film directors (Ridley Scott’s latest film The Counsellor has Cameron Diaz living there with her pet cheetah), advertising execs (it was the backdrop for Renault’s celebrated Va-Va-Voom advert, among others) and now high-end publishers. Thames & Hudson’s recent release is a lavish coffee-table book dedicated entirely to Skywood House, exquisitely documenting every detail of its design in a way usually reserved for famous historical buildings rather than the 1990s home of a relatively unknown architect.
What, then, makes Skywood so universally appealing? To start with it’s probably more alluringly described as a single-storey pavilion in a parkland setting, rather than a bungalow, and it was built for the retirement of Phillips, the former CEO of Foster + Partners, one of the world’s largest and most successful architecture firms. Its location is in fact in a miraculous slice of leafy green-belt land untouched by the dense city that surrounds it, and the airport it sits next to is more a minuscule airfield than an international hub.
Skywood House at dusk Picture: Nigel Young, Foster + Partners
Layout leaves the kitchen/design space partially concealed behind the sliding glass panels, while the two day beds are separated and provide seating. This option provides a large, open living space Picture: Neil Crawford/Foster + Partners
This unique location, so convenient for central London and Heathrow, is of course a major draw for the film, ad and music industries that flock there, but the more significant draw is the sheer jaw-dropping beauty of the house itself. Needless to say, what appears to be a simple, seductive design is in fact the result of years of refinement on the part of Phillips. As he says in the book Skywood House and the architecture of Graham Phillips, “one can’t explain the sheer amount of effort necessary to create a result that looks effortless”......Continue Reading
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