Dive Into This Modernist Lake Home In Rural Belgium

Belgian interior architect Peter Ivens was asked by a family of real estate developers to reimagine their modernist lake house at Miramar, the summertime water skiing destination roughly halfway between Antwerp and Eindhoven. Built decades ago by the grandparents, the house was a time capsule when it passed down to the current generation. Imagine 5,400 square feet of shiny black granite floor tile and dark brown architectural mirrors. The vibe was “dated, not fresh,” Ivens recalls.

Though clearly the work of an architect, the blueprints had been lost. Fortunately, Ivens was hired for a fresh take. “We stripped everything and made it naked,” he says.

Peter Ivens Refreshes A 1970s Lakeside Home

The exterior maintains its existing rhythm of transparent glazing and solid brick walls. He replaced old blue-aluminum windows with new ones framed in padauk, a rot-resistant tropical hardwood. Left unfinished, they have weathered a driftwood grey. New stacking exterior glass doors are blackened steel and slide open in fair weather to reconnect the house with Nature.

Ground floor interiors are loft-like and flow thanks to extensive demolition. “It’s a party house,” Ivens laughs. Smooth microcement floors are an earthy greenish grey, to provide continuity throughout.

The old kitchen was closed-in, but the new one is wide-open and centers on a freestanding circular pedestal island that quotes 1970s Italian design. Walls were stripped of any remaining plaster and got troweled with new “cement grey” stucco. The original wood staircase leading to the five bedrooms upstairs was ripped out, and its sculptural replacement is concrete. The plaster drop ceilings were there originally, Ivens says, to reduce air-conditioning costs. Removing them raised the ceilings to 10 feet, exposing handsome structural concrete beams and the slab overhead. However, that destroyed the possibility of running electrical wires discretely. He dropped new recessed lighting through holes drilled in the existing ceiling slab, then connected them with wiring that runs on top of the concrete, embedded invisibly in a new topping slab.

Tour This Miramar Lake Home With Nature Vibes

Lee Mindel’s New Gallery in New York Showcases Rare Modernist Furnishings

The likes of Trudie Styler and Sting trust Lee Mindel’s opinions about 20th Century design. An Interior Design Hall of Fame member inducted in 1996, he curates collectible modernism from leading Scandinavian dealers for his architecture clients. This fall, he also delivers a group of rarely-seen furnishings to a public stage in New York. His “Garden of Celestial Delights” exhibition opens the new Galerie 56, a Lower Manhattan project space right downstairs from his own apartment, in the “Jenga” tower by Herzog & de Meuron.

Just before the pandemic, Mindel purchased the gallery’s then-unfinished storefront—partly as a service to his neighbors in the tower. “We didn’t want it to become a nail salon,” he laughs. Workers have continued to toil, assembling and mirror-polishing the developer’s monumental outdoor Anish Kapoor balloon sculpture amusingly squashed under a corner of the tower. New floor-to-ceiling gallery windows practically bring the Kapoor inside: one more precious object on display.

“We’re like a museum for the street,” Mindel says, noting QR codes in the windows that link to descriptions of his inaugural exhibition. Highlights include a rare 1956 Alvar Aalto laminated sculpture in oak, birch, and bronze. A 54-inch Spiral ceiling lamp by Poul Henningsen is one of only five manufactured in 1963. Kallemo designer Mats Theselius upholstered his 1990 Aluminum Armchair in a striking birch-bark basketweave. Almost everything came from Paul Jackson of Jacksons in Stockholm and Ole Høstbo of Dansk Møblelkunst in Copenhagen.

This show runs only through November 14, but Mindel promises a fascinating follow-up illuminating the inspired connection between Isamu Noguchi and Charlotte Perriand. Meanwhile, the gallery remains flexible, thanks to projection and audio infrastructure allowing its temporary configuration as a conference room for large meetings with Shelton Mindel corporate clients. 240 Church Street.

Revisit Luis Barragán’s Work Through the Lens of Photographer Tim Street-Porter at Art Division

Twentieth-Century Mexican architect Luis Barragán wasn’t widely known when Tim Street-Porter started shooting his work. The acclaimed California-based photographer documented nearly every Barragán house south-of-the-border for his 1989 photo book Casa Mexicana, which “sold about 130,000 copies altogether and was given as an official Christmas present by the President of Mexico,” he notes. For those yet to come under the late architect’s spell, Street-Porter says that his pictures showcase a “mysterious monastic quality.” Dan McCleary selected 11 of the most colorful and abstract to exhibit this month in the public gallery at Art Division, his non-profit visual arts academy, in the Rampart district of Los Angeles. Pinned simply on the wall, the oversized photo prints will absolutely energize at-risk youth studying there. On view October 15-29 at 2432 W. 6th Street.

Moinard Bétaille Polishes Up the Hotel Cala di Volpe in Sardinia

“The fantasy was to offer the most prestigious guests on the planet a chance to go barefoot and live a simple life in nature,” Bétaille recalls. Couëlle’s late son, self-described “gypsy architect” Savin Couëlle, built a new wing of guest rooms with the same glam-Flintstones vibe during the region’s ’70’s celebrity heyday. But even as competitors raised the bar for luxury globally, Cala di Volpe’s standards and maintenance lagged. “Step-by-step modifications had destroyed the original spirit of the hotel,” Moinard adds. Air-conditioning was noisy and poorly integrated, and minibars were “just a fridge in the middle of the room.” Bétaille remembers the old guest rooms as “quite square,” with tile bathrooms she found “super strict and rigid.” The two won the chance to renovate the 122-room property in
a design competition. Following careful study, the firm tackled three prototype rooms in an initial phase, presenting them for approval from the management and treasured repeat guests.

What has become a six-year transformation enters its final phase this winter when the hotel will refresh the final dozen rooms after closing for the season. Taken together, the inter­ventions extend the lessons of Couëlle’s sculptural interiors. The redesign loosens up the guest rooms with new radiused stonework, handmade plaster arches, and room dividers composed from kaleidoscopic glass chunks placed by Bétaille personally. New clear-glass shower doors are cut with a curve, limestone floor slabs from a local source have been placed in an eccentric pattern inspired by flagstone versions the interior architects spotted in period snaps of Couëlle houses, and beds have been oriented toward the sea view (previously they had faced wall-mounted TVs). Each monumental headboard is plastered individually in-place, threaded with LEDs and accented using locally woven baskets hung as wall art. Topsy-turvy canopies are composed of juniper branches laced with reeds like a rustic Sardinian hut. “There’s no duplication,”
Moinard notes. “Come back to stay in another room, and you will find it to be in the same spirit but never exactly the same.”

The lobby also needed taller wooden stools once the bar was elevated, for better visual access to the seascape out the window. Local craftsmen who extended the artisanal patterned copper-and-stucco bar skirt created a completely new check-in desk using the same materials. Quite frankly, they could not have done it better.

Studio Salaris: Art consultant

bonacina through cala: custom chairs (lobby)