https://estateanddesign.com/ The latest stories from Estate & Design: estates, architecture, interiors, landscape, design and objects. en https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/the-glass-house-new-canaan/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/the-glass-house-new-canaan/ Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/villa-mairea-noormarkku/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/villa-mairea-noormarkku/ Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-cavrois/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-cavrois/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In Croix, France, Robert Mallet-Stevens built a textile magnate a house like no other: sixty metres of yellow brick designed to the last door handle, lost for decades, then restored to its 1932 state. It is the architect's most complete surviving work. https://estateanddesign.com/landscape/hidcote-manor-garden/ https://estateanddesign.com/landscape/hidcote-manor-garden/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 On a Gloucestershire hillside, Lawrence Johnston divided ten acres into a sequence of walled garden rooms. A century on, every serious garden designer still works in the grammar he invented. https://estateanddesign.com/design/the-lime-cycle/ https://estateanddesign.com/design/the-lime-cycle/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/hill-house-helensburgh/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/hill-house-helensburgh/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/palais-stoclet-brussels/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/palais-stoclet-brussels/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In Brussels stands Josef Hoffmann's 1905 to 1911 masterpiece, a total work of art with a Klimt frieze in the dining room. It is a UNESCO site, and it is closed to the public. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/villa-savoye-poissy/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/villa-savoye-poissy/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Le Corbusier's 1928 to 1931 villa outside Paris is the built manifesto of modern architecture's five points. It survived war, abandonment and a demolition order. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/salk-institute-la-jolla/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/salk-institute-la-jolla/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Louis Kahn's 1965 institute for Jonas Salk pairs two concrete laboratory blocks across a travertine court that runs to the Pacific. It is still a working laboratory. https://estateanddesign.com/interiors/casa-barragan-mexico-city/ https://estateanddesign.com/interiors/casa-barragan-mexico-city/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/gamble-house-pasadena/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/gamble-house-pasadena/ Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Greene and Greene's 1908 to 1909 Pasadena house for the Procter and Gamble heir is the most complete American Arts and Crafts interior ever built. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/sanssouci-palace-potsdam/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/sanssouci-palace-potsdam/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/blenheim-palace-woodstock/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/blenheim-palace-woodstock/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 A nation thanked its greatest general with the grandest house in England. Three centuries later, the Dukes of Marlborough still live in it. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/schonbrunn-palace-vienna/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/schonbrunn-palace-vienna/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/fallingwater-pennsylvania/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/fallingwater-pennsylvania/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Frank Lloyd Wright's 1935 weekend house for the Kaufmann family stands partly over a Pennsylvania waterfall. Ninety years on, it remains the house by which all modern houses are judged. https://estateanddesign.com/design/frank-lloyd-wright-profile/ https://estateanddesign.com/design/frank-lloyd-wright-profile/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/design/charles-rennie-mackintosh-profile/ https://estateanddesign.com/design/charles-rennie-mackintosh-profile/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/quinta-da-regaleira-sintra/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/quinta-da-regaleira-sintra/ Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In the romantic hills of Sintra, the millionaire Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro built a palace, a chapel, and a garden of grottoes and initiation wells between 1904 and 1910. The most enigmatic estate in Portugal. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-tugendhat/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-tugendhat/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-necchi-campiglio/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-necchi-campiglio/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/katsura-imperial-villa/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/katsura-imperial-villa/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/casa-de-vidro/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/casa-de-vidro/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Completed in 1951 on a former tea farm above Sao Paulo, the Glass House was Lina Bo Bardi's first built work and her declaration of optimism: a house lifted into the Atlantic rainforest. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/clos-pegase-winery/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/clos-pegase-winery/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/farnsworth-house/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/farnsworth-house/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In 1945 a Chicago physician commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to build a weekend house beside the Fox River. What rose on eight steel columns became the century's most distilled statement of open-plan living. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/kaufmann-desert-house/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/kaufmann-desert-house/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. commissioned Fallingwater from Frank Lloyd Wright, then turned to Richard Neutra for a winter house in Palm Springs. The result became the defining example of desert modernism. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/villa-muller/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/villa-muller/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Behind an unadorned white cube in Prague, Adolf Loos built his most complete realisation of the Raumplan: rooms at different levels, ceiling heights set by importance, and interiors of marble, lemonwood and mahogany. https://estateanddesign.com/interiors/olivetti-showroom-venice/ https://estateanddesign.com/interiors/olivetti-showroom-venice/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In a room only four metres high beneath the Procuratie Vecchie, Carlo Scarpa composed one of the great interiors of the twentieth century: a staircase of Aurisina stone, a floor of Murano glass, and brass against the salt air. https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/high-and-over/ https://estateanddesign.com/architecture/high-and-over/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Designed in 1929 by a young New Zealand architect, High and Over was among the first modernist houses in Britain. Divided in the 1960s, it was reunited and restored to its 1930s layout. https://estateanddesign.com/landscape/villa-d-este-tivoli/ https://estateanddesign.com/landscape/villa-d-este-tivoli/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/landscape/rousham-house-oxfordshire/ https://estateanddesign.com/landscape/rousham-house-oxfordshire/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 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. https://estateanddesign.com/design/return-of-natural-stone/ https://estateanddesign.com/design/return-of-natural-stone/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In serious residential architecture, stone is structural and spatial again. Four buildings show what the material is teaching. https://estateanddesign.com/design/jean-prouve-demountable-house/ https://estateanddesign.com/design/jean-prouve-demountable-house/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 A French metalworker with no architectural training set out to house a ruined country from a factory floor. The portal frame was his answer. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/estate-as-complete-work/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/estate-as-complete-work/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 The greatest estates are not collections of good decisions. They are single visions, carried through architecture, interiors, landscape, objects, and craft, until nothing could belong anywhere else. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/hearst-castle-san-simeon/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/hearst-castle-san-simeon/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 For twenty-eight years, William Randolph Hearst and the architect Julia Morgan built a Mediterranean fantasy on a California hilltop. It remains the most storied great house in America. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/the-breakers-newport/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/the-breakers-newport/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Richard Morris Hunt built Cornelius Vanderbilt II a 70-room Italian palazzo on the cliffs of Newport. It set the standard for the American great house. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/biltmore-estate-asheville/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/biltmore-estate-asheville/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 Richard Morris Hunt's Chateauesque mansion and Frederick Law Olmsted's landscape in Asheville remain the defining American estate: 8,000 acres, still Vanderbilt-owned. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/chatsworth-house-derbyshire/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/chatsworth-house-derbyshire/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 In Derbyshire, the Devonshires' great house has been rebuilt, rethought, and replanted for generations. It has never stood still, and that is the point. https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-san-michele-capri/ https://estateanddesign.com/estates/villa-san-michele-capri/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:00 -0700 A Swedish physician built his dream house on Roman ruins above the sea at Anacapri, filled it with antiquities, and gave it to Sweden. It is the most personal great house in Italy.