The House Under the Ground

The House Under the Ground by WillemsenU is a unique Dutch house blending into its green field.

Eindhoven-based architecture studio WillemsenU has hidden a house in an undulating meadow on the edge of a nature reserve in The Netherlands. Surrounded by wild flowers and meandering streams, the house has a curved concrete, green roof that rises from the ground and could easily be mistaken for a grassy hill.

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Donkou

A place where time flows graciously slow in an age where time flies overwhelmingly fast. That was the beginning of the private library and cafe, Donkou / Kissa Fang.

Donkou is a private library created by Yoshitaka Haba and his associates, with the adjoining coffee house Kissa Fang. Donkou offers a maximum capacity of six people per 90-minute stay, three rotations a day, with reservations accepted via the website. Visitors remove their shoes, put phones in a drawer and step into the library where they are free to browse any of the 3,000 books on the shelves.

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Art Barn

In 2022, composer Max Richter and visual artist Yulia Mahr set up a multimedia production studio designed by Charlie Luxton Design inside a former farmhouse in Oxfordshire, UK.

This project presented an exciting opportunity to create a modern, high quality music recording facility and art studio. The owners, who work individually and in collaboration, required bespoke accommodation to facilitate their work. The resulting design provides world class recording studios and associated facilities, art studios, office space for support staff and a canteen for permanent staff and visiting musicians.

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Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage Garden

The vast garden of the late Derek Jarman is the subject of this short film over on global video channel Nowness.

It was established in 1986 on the bleak British landscape of Dungeness, Kent around an old tar-painted fisherman’s cottage, neighbouring a nuclear power station. Director and narrator of this short film Howard Sooley—a photographer, gardener, and Jarman’s dear friend—first started visiting Prospect Cottage in the late 1980s. Together, they went on to produce a record of how the garden evolved, ‘Derek Jarman’s Garden’—the last book Jarman ever wrote.

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Book Club 002: Defining the Craft

My 2nd featured book is one of my first purchases when starting AT design practice 20 years ago.

Peter Walker and Partners ‘ Defining the Craft’ works on a far larger scale than most residential projects, instead working on large campuses, art galleries and notably more recently, the World Trade Centre memorial garden in New York.

However the purity, boldness and rigour of their modernist Japanese infused approach creates iconic landscapes of such artful expression, it is impossible not to be inspired by them.

For instance, their Tanner Foundation garden at Harvard University; their Datum Line of Light at the IBM Makuhari Building, or the Birch Grove Courtyard at the Novartis headquarters – these are just three projects seared into my design consciousness who – along with Landscape Architects such as Dan Kiley, have undoubtedly informed my ongoing enthusiasm for landscape design.

How one can solve the challenges of a particular site with the utmost elegance is always a question PWP has instilled in AT Design. Probably the most instructive take away from this book however is how ‘peopled’ the images are, reminding us that landscape spaces are for people; for enjoyment, for play, for quiet repose....

Here’s to a creative, peaceful and productive 2024 to you all!

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