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Bright Pavilion from Phifer and Partners Makes a Home for Art

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Thomas Phifer and Partners designed this delightful breezy house in upstate New York for a former museum art director and his wife. It is a one bedroom retreat with a fresh and exhilaratingly simple concept.

The owners wanted to live in the garden – with art. This witty pavilion makes that dream come true.

As you approach the house through the gardens and admire the view of sky and water along the horizon of the Long Island Sound, you are suddenly aware that you have been looking right through the entire house.

Views through houses are not that new, but in this case, through the extremely minimal use of walls, the entire house is barely there, it is all glass.

Barely interrupting long views  across the expanse of grass lawns of glinting silver water, the canopies and the glass somehow become part of the view itself.

The functional parts of the house, like the kitchen, never touch the exterior glass wall but are completely freestanding; parallel to the transparent glass rectangle, forming a virtual box within a box.

Inside, the selectively amassed collection of 20th century paintings, sculptures, and glassware fills the house, echoed by the lightness and flight of the pavilion canopies.

Art fills the home. Here a lacquered Japanese screen is seen sunning itself across a vivid garden of mosses.

The architects have fulfilled the brief. This is a home, in a garden, for art.

Via Contemporist