Mountain House
January 17, 2011 4:16 PM   Subscribe

Mountain House, the first project in the U.S. from genius Japanese design firm Atelier Bow Wow. Designed for Mike Mills and Miranda July. [via]
posted by puny human (24 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is truly beautiful.
posted by poe at 4:26 PM on January 17, 2011


The house reflects the property, partially finished open space. Very nice. I'm surprised how long its taken the land to recover after 150 years.
posted by stbalbach at 4:27 PM on January 17, 2011


That looks like a really nice place to hang out in, but at the same time it looks to me like a very stock-standard approach to wilderness houses that you see zillions of in every architectural magazine: plonk a minimalistic shoebox down in the middle of nowhere & put a distinctively-angled feature roof onto it.
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:30 PM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


It's a very sensible house. I like the way the roof hovers over the enclosed structure, which is a very good way of keeping a house cool without spending too much on AC.

On the other hand, if this is landscape that is "still recovering" from the "devastating environmental effects wreaked by gold mining more than 150 years ago", it's a valid question to ask why it is necessary to build there at all.
posted by beagle at 4:32 PM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Some of the photos are quite unflattering, but I like it. As places to escape to to create art, it seems to meet the standard.
posted by OHenryPacey at 5:09 PM on January 17, 2011


That looks uncomfortable and chilly. Also, likely to burst into flame in the next small brushfire.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 5:12 PM on January 17, 2011


Not to be confused with this mountain house, ca
posted by FuturisticDragon at 5:20 PM on January 17, 2011


It is still one bathtub shy of a Cialis advert.
posted by Keith Talent at 5:26 PM on January 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


More bow wow from the Venice Bienalle, including scale models of Mountain House here.
posted by puny human at 5:36 PM on January 17, 2011


If you only give it a quick glance then I can see where you are coming from Ubu. But as with anything worthwhile, it is the execution and attention to detail that set it apart, that create something more than your usual minimalist shoebox. The way this design echoes the environment, the play of Japanese aesthetic against the rough California landscape, the roof deck, and for me, the doors. I love those doors.

(I'll admit the bathtub doesn't work for me -- forced quirkiness never does -- and I would be willing to bet that was a feature requested by the owners and not part of the original plan)
posted by puny human at 5:45 PM on January 17, 2011


oops, part 1 from the Venice Biennale.

(these are just so ridiculously good it makes me want to go to japan and hunt down each one of those houses)
posted by puny human at 5:55 PM on January 17, 2011


This does indeed appear to be the perfect home for a man, his dog, and a replicant.
posted by gwint at 6:05 PM on January 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


I like the enclosed bed.
posted by KingEdRa at 6:31 PM on January 17, 2011


I love it! Going in my clip book for when I get the funds to buy some land and build my dream house.
posted by arcticseal at 7:41 PM on January 17, 2011


I belong there more than Miranda July.
posted by kenko at 8:02 PM on January 17, 2011


Excellent. Favorited hard. This house would work well in the PNW where it is not always cold enough to keep you inside, but you want to stay dry, outside.

I pity the dog though the first time he spins around and slams into that sharp angle inside.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 8:02 PM on January 17, 2011


"Forced quirkiness" is a very good two-word summary of the M.O. of Miranda July.
posted by Dr. Wu at 9:12 PM on January 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


This magazine article (warning: pdf) gives the full story of the Mike Mills house. Not to take anything away from the Bow Wow folks, but the real heart of the house is Ken Meffan's, the builder (and an architect himself). He lives full-time up in the Sierras, and has built a bunch of amazing homes out of the same kind of bomb-proof timbers and with the same open, natural spaces. He's also an amazing guy. You can check out his personal site here (caution: Flintsone web design), and a Dwell story about Meffan's own house here (caveat: self-link).
posted by turducken at 10:01 PM on January 17, 2011


I love Bow-Wow. Their construction drawings are amazing, and tell the complete story of the building, something of a lost art in architecture these days; the software rendering with the beautiful/blurry people photoshopped in does most of the talking.

Their book Graphic Anatomy is worth a look. (Preview)
posted by Casimir at 10:54 PM on January 17, 2011


Sorry, but this just looks like standard starchitect fare—a gargantuan, uninsulated, energy-intensive folly for the back-to-the-land fantasies of the wealthy. There's lots of lovely details and great elements among the gigantism, but ultimately it's still mired in the cultural framework of greed and big gestures that created the ruination it's meant to be addressing.

This is meant to be simple living, but it's an ironic gesture at best.
posted by sonascope at 4:35 AM on January 18, 2011


a gargantuan, uninsulated, energy-intensive folly for the back-to-the-land fantasies of the wealthy

The article at the second link explains that they used SIPs (structural insulated panels), so it's not uninsulated. SIPs are generally quite energy efficient.

The enclosed building is 1,240 sq. feet, which is rather modest (and I'd say it's downright tiny compared to the "fantasies of the wealthy").

I'm afraid I don't understand your complaint.
posted by sriracha at 4:53 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Sorry, but this just looks like standard starchitect fare-

Your comment is a great example of simple living.
posted by Casimir at 6:05 AM on January 18, 2011


The line was "back-to-the-land fantasies of the wealthy," and I mean precisely that.

This is simplicity play-acting, an assemblage of recycling/local use tropes tacked onto a movie set of the standard big jagged box so beloved of ideologue architects. It's cute, and it's probably a neat little playhouse, but it's not remotely integrated into or built of the land around, and when the client claimed "I didn’t want anything too sharp or sleek, as if a UFO landed on the hill. Instead of a beautiful spaceship, I wanted a tugboat," I just had to laugh. This thing may be a spaceship made of homosote, shiny fresh-milled lumber, and glass, but it's still a spaceship. Every single detail about this place is sharp, angular, or streamlined to the point of being a slick, unbroken surface like those on the MacBooks that take pride of place in half the photos that include people.

Whether it's too big is a reasonable question. In the fifties, you could raise a whole family in 900-1200 feet. Now we need stark open volumes punctuated by just enough thrift store furniture to imply a joyous embrace of the idea of recycling, and built-in beds from which to work on one's computer. There's not an unfashionable ceiling fan in sight to set the air moving in the sepulchral enclosed volume, and those homosote walls don't invite ornamentation, no matter what their push-pin friendly surfaces would suggest. There's no accounting for tastes, of course, but heating 1240 square feet, most of which is empty, is a lot less green than heating 940 square feet. Free country, I suppose.

There are lovely, engaging facets to this structure. That said, it's not what it purports to be.

When I was working as a builder, I cultivated a fair number of clients who very much remind me of the clients here. They'd throw out catchphrases like "recycled," and "sustainable," and "green," but god forbid you suggest that keeping the old, but perfectly tidy and serviceable, Hotpoint is technically green when they wanted an Aga. They'd draw up plans to scrape and dump lovely original linoleum in great shape to put in "sustainable" bamboo flooring, or have me demo and replace gorgeous tiled pink bathrooms with pink fixtures because they were pink bathrooms, which are, of course, punishable by death these days among the community of air-pinching design aficionados. It was all just weird, this disconnect between the lust for adopted zen simplicity and the unstoppable need for destructive overbuilding and overrenovating.

If this structure is truly meant to stand with the recovering landscape, shouldn't it have a form that makes it less of a geometric exclamation point built of fresh-milled imported lumber and stucco-covered SIPs and perched on at the apex of the hill like a fancy little hat? It doesn't have to go to the extreme of being a hobbit house, per se, but it could at least incorporate some of the form and mass of the land in some manner. If an article's going to say that "Atelier Bow-Wow’s deftly arranged spaces and offbeat massing have this tugboat pushing architectural experimentation forward," I should not be able to go to my bookshelf and pull out forty year-old architecture books and find built examples that only differ from this house in terms of slightly divergent architectural fads.

It's a fine house for what it is, I guess, but just feels like a missed opportunity to me. Not everyone thinks so, which is why it's fun to be human. It's telling, though, that the builder's own house feels like a real living place, instead of like Architecture™. Is it the verdant environment, the evidence of actual human existence, and the elements of accident and chaos, or is it the lack of fussy, intrusive, overwrought orthodoxies?

De gustibus and all that, but I'm not convinced.
posted by sonascope at 7:52 AM on January 18, 2011 [11 favorites]


That's a lot of 10 cent words to say you took people's money for doing work you apparently regret. Either you're in the building trade or you're not. A good contractor or architect will steer clients towards making more informed choices. They may not win on every count nor do they have a say in how their work is written up. ("keep this pink bathroom" because it's already there isn't enlightened architecture, it's a shallow conservationism.)
posted by noway at 11:23 PM on January 22, 2011


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