Latest

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.

2026-10-07

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.

2026-10-07

Estates

Villa Cavrois: The Modern Chateau That Became a Manifesto

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.

2026-09-30

Landscape

Hidcote Manor Garden: The Invention of the Outdoor Room

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.

2026-09-30

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.

2026-09-30

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.

2026-09-25

Architecture

Palais Stoclet: The Most Beautiful House You Cannot Visit

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.

2026-09-25

Architecture

Villa Savoye: The Machine for Living at Poissy

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.

2026-09-25

Architecture

The Salk Institute: Kahn's Monastery for Science

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.

2026-09-25

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.

2026-09-25

Architecture

The Gamble House: America's Ultimate Bungalow

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.

2026-09-25

Estates

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.

2026-09-24

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.

2026-09-24

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.

2026-09-24

Estates

Fallingwater: The Most Famous Private House Ever Built

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.

2026-09-24

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.

2026-09-24

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.

2026-09-24

Estates

Quinta da Regaleira: Sintra's Palace of Mysteries

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.

2026-09-24

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.

2026-09-23

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.

2026-09-23

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.

2026-09-23

Estates

Casa de Vidro: Lina Bo Bardi's House in the Canopy

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.

2026-09-23

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.

2026-09-23

Architecture

Farnsworth House: Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion of Glass and Steel

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.

2026-09-23

Architecture

The Kaufmann Desert House: Richard Neutra's Answer to the Desert

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.

2026-09-23

Architecture

Villa Muller: Adolf Loos and the Architecture of the Raumplan

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.

2026-09-23

Interiors

The Olivetti Showroom: Carlo Scarpa's Venetian Interior

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.

2026-09-23

Architecture

High and Over: The Restoration of England's First Modernist Country House

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.

2026-09-23

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.

2026-09-23

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.

2026-09-23

Design

The Return of Natural Stone

In serious residential architecture, stone is structural and spatial again. Four buildings show what the material is teaching.

2026-09-23

Design

Jean Prouve: The House That Could Be Built in a Day

A French metalworker with no architectural training set out to house a ruined country from a factory floor. The portal frame was his answer.

2026-09-23

Estates

The Estate as a Complete Work

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.

2026-09-23

Estates

Hearst Castle: The Enchanted Hill Above San Simeon

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.

2026-09-23

Estates

The Breakers: Newport's Marble Answer to the Gilded Age

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.

2026-09-23

Estates

Biltmore: America's Largest House, Still in the Family

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.

2026-09-23

Estates

Chatsworth: Three Centuries of the Cavendish Eye

In Derbyshire, the Devonshires' great house has been rebuilt, rethought, and replanted for generations. It has never stood still, and that is the point.

2026-09-23

Estates

Villa San Michele: Axel Munthe's House of Light on Capri

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.

2026-09-23