A Cloud-Like Refuge in California – Azure Magazine

Although we have witnessed an ongoing appreciation for the modernist aesthetic in inside layout and architecture, we are inclined to ignore some of its characteristic design features were being initially released to regulate the behaviour of inhabitants. Le Corbusier famously employed a rational aesthetic of clean lines, rectilinear varieties, and sleek surfaces in the areas he created to guarantee that their inhabitants would self-average their behaviour as nevertheless in public. Feeling a unique lack of domestic ease and comfort, the house owners of this modernist property in Mill Valley commissioned OPA to make an setting that would be a refuge from “the conformity of the outside the house environment.”

For the undertaking, OPA forewent the tropes of modernism and as a substitute sought inspiration from the ever-modifying and variable features of character. Guided by the target of softening the existing interior — a design and style choice that gave the undertaking the identify Softie — the architects chose to make a cloud-like atmosphere through the space. To attain a dreamy good quality, plump, undulating, bulging masses were being carefully positioned on to the existing surfaces of the 3-story house. A great deal like how clouds visually change their surroundings, the organic and natural sorts “erode and blur the order of the rational modernist grid,” with no totally erasing it.

Like an uneven settling of fog across a landscape, softness is in depth during the room in distinctive intensities and in a selection of means. A strategic placement of cloud-esque components meant that OPA could wholly modify the experience of the entire house devoid of acquiring to transform each and every sq. inch of the household.

From outside the house, a freshly bulging white stair seems to spill out from the inside — a trace as to what lies driving the front doorway. Inside, the undulating ceiling drops to meet the ground and, in accomplishing so, creates a cave-like nook. More within, the walls curve around beforehand sharp corners and hug structural columns, as if in an endeavor to take up them into their bloated masses. The delicate white interior envelope generates a playfully calm ambiance and is open and brilliant when continue to supplying ease and comfort and a perception of privacy. The task is topped off exterior, on the terrace, higher than which a cloud-shaped cover hovers — seeming to float along with the other clouds in the sky.