A Chat With The Home Owners - Green House
What are your favourite things in your new home?
Amelie: One of my favourite things is having really large windows on the top and bottom floors that just open out to the sky and having that beautiful outlook to the greenery it just feel really connected to nature and its really calming and all that beautiful natural light and looking at the sky and the weather.
Karl: My favourite thing is the fact that it’s really comfortable, it’s warm
Amelie: And it feels really healthy
Karl: yeah and it’s feeling like its performing how it should be doing which is a big thing for me personally
Amelie: And another favourite thing is it looks really cool from the northern façade, it looks geometric and symmetrical and really funky and raw and industrial.
And we have had friends and family of ours , my brother in law is an artist so we’ve got some of his pieces up, we’ve got some of our friends pieces of art up they are incredible and we love the fact that they’re our friends and we love their art .
We also brought back some things from the states so we went vintage shopping there’s an antique market in the San Francisco Bay area where you get up at the crack of dawn and find cool pieces of Danish and Swedish furniture that we’ve brought back and also parts of furniture that belonged to my parents that I’ve kind of complemented the redwood chairs they had they’re from Vienna my dad’s from Vienna and we’ve just found other pieces on trade me to kind of compliment the collection
Karl: Yeah I suppose for me it was really nice pulling out the stuff we gathered in Paris and the states that’s all been packed up then to finally finish the house and get to uncover all these little different things and actually decide to where to put them, yeah it is quite nice to have a link back to that past life …
Amelie: And also from our other travels like the panther head from Mexico …
Karl: Yeah the jaguar head up there, yeah, we quite like that one too.
What are your top tips for building a Grand Design?
Karl: My top tip would be a lot of the time when you are building a house it’s all rush rush rush and hitting schedule , I think you need to take your time, even though that might seem difficult, it’s worth taking your time to do it properly and try not to put too much extra pressure on yourself to get it done by a certain date because you will get there eventually. For us I’m really happy with how long it took us , it did take us a bit longer than we thought but it always does, I think the result means it’s well worth it.
So yeah, don’t come up with a schedule and beat yourself up with trying to hot that schedule because I think it’s just impossible, it’s not going to happen.
Amelie: My top tip would be to think about form and function together so first of all you need to think about what space is supposed to do, if it’s a kitchen or a living room what do you need it to do then think about how that might look as well in terms of the form. It’s hard to give lots of examples but I think in terms of our concrete buttresses, that’s an architectural element and it’s structural but it also has a functional and a form element to, that it looks cool and help to divide the spaces.
Now you're done what next?
Amelie: well we still have phase two we have to do all the landscaping, finish the stairs
Karl: Build a car deck …
Amelie: And we don’t actually have a letterbox yet.
Karl: I want to build an earth sheltered green house, but that will be after the car deck.
Amelie: And we’re already getting a whole lot of questions about environmentally friendly building practices so I think we will be taking a lot of time to support others in their projects.
