Estates
Villa Tugendhat: Mies van der Rohe's Uncompromising House in Brno
Completed in 1930 for the textile manufacturer Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Grete, this steel-framed villa in Brno redefined what a house could be, and then spent the next eighty years surviving history.
Estates
Villa Necchi Campiglio: Milan's Quiet Statement in Stone and Brass
Behind a deliberately plain street wall in Milan, Piero Portaluppi built one of the great bourgeois villas of the 1930s, later layered by Tomaso Buzzi and preserved intact by the FAI.
Estates
Katsura Imperial Villa: The Estate Without an Architect
On the western bank of the Katsura River, a seventeenth-century princely retreat shaped modern architecture without ever naming a designer. Its choreography of buildings, water, and path remains the standard.
Architecture
Clos Pegase: Michael Graves and the Temple to Wine
In 1984, a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art competition drew ninety-six design teams to design a Napa Valley winery. Michael Graves won with a postmodern Bacchanalian temple. Four decades on, it has been restored and reopened.
Estates
View all →
Sanssouci: Frederick the Great's Palace of No Worries
Above the terraced vineyards of Potsdam, Frederick the Great built a small palace with a French name meaning 'without worries', and spent his happiest years trying to live up to it.
Estates
Blenheim Palace: England's Monument to Victory
A nation thanked its greatest general with the grandest house in England. Three centuries later, the Dukes of Marlborough still live in it.
Estates
Schönbrunn: Six Centuries of Habsburg Power
1,441 rooms, a Baroque garden the size of a small town, and the summer address of an empire: Schönbrunn is where the Habsburgs lived, ruled, and finally said goodbye.
Architecture
View all →
Architecture
The Glass House: Philip Johnson's Fifty-Year Diary in Glass and Steel
Completed in 1949 as Philip Johnson's own house in New Canaan, Connecticut, a single transparent room on a brick plinth became the first entry in a fifty-year diary of buildings, landscape and art.
Architecture
Villa Mairea: Alvar Aalto's Experiment in the Finnish Forest
Designed between 1937 and 1939 for Harry and Maire Gullichsen, Villa Mairea is the house where Aalto was told to experiment, and did: a modernist plan that thinks like a forest.
Architecture
Hill House: The Mackintosh Masterpiece Drying Inside a Steel Box
Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House at Helensburgh, completed in 1904, is his most complete domestic work. A flawed render nearly destroyed it. A chainmail-clad shelter is now drying it out.
Interiors
View all →
Interiors
Sir John Soane's Museum: The House Its Owner Froze by Law
Between 1792 and 1825 the architect Sir John Soane rebuilt three London houses around his own growing collection, then persuaded Parliament to preserve the result exactly as he left it. It is still there, and it is still free.
Interiors
Casa Barragan: Emotional Architecture in Tacubaya
Luis Barragan's 1948 house and studio in Mexico City hides chromatic, light-washed interiors behind a plain street facade. It won him the Pritzker and UNESCO listing.
Landscape
View all →
Landscape
Stourhead: The Garden That Walks Like a Painting
From 1741, the banker Henry Hoare II turned a Wiltshire valley into a circuit of lake, temples and grotto that visitors still read one composed view at a time. It remains the fullest surviving statement of the English landscape garden.
Landscape
Villa d'Este: The Garden That Taught Europe
On a steep hillside at Tivoli, Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este and his designer Pirro Ligorio made water do the work of architecture, and changed the European garden for good.
Landscape
Rousham: The Augustan Garden
In the Cherwell valley, William Kent composed his most complete landscape as a sequence of classical scenes, and the family that commissioned it still lives there.
Design
View all →
Design
The Lime Cycle: The Oldest Wall Finish Is the Most Modern Choice
Burn limestone, slake it with water, lay it in three coats, and let the air finish the work. Lime plaster is two thousand years old and suddenly the most contemporary finish in the room.
Design
Frank Lloyd Wright: The Architect Who Made Buildings Belong
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1867 to 1959, designed more than a thousand buildings and insisted they should grow from their sites. A life of the most consequential American architect, from the Prairie houses to the Guggenheim.
Design
Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Scotland's Prophet of the Total Work of Art
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, 1868 to 1928, fused Art Nouveau, Celtic Revival, and the Arts and Crafts into the Glasgow Style, and designed houses as complete works of art down to the last detail. The Scottish master the modernists never forgot.
