In Bucharest, Romania, a circle house from architects Razvan Barsan & Partners –
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romanian circle house
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casa rotonda
An interesting and somewhat mysterious round house, crowned by a distinctive cupola-style lookout, in the town of Cornuda, Italy –
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pleasantly round
A beautiful double-round house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is now for sale in Pleasantville, New York. Built in the late 1940s, the house’s circular design prefigures the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.
The asking price is $1.5 million.
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halfway to infinity
Jack Lenor Larsen, a pioneering textile designer, designed and built a round house in East Hampton, NY, in the early 1960s –
The house was inspired by his 1961 trip to South Africa, where he saw some of the traditional round houses of the Ndebele people. In an interview conducted years after he sold the house, Larsen described his design process, and some of his thoughts on living in the round –
[W]ith a round house, you can make a compass out of a piece of string, and Win and I said, “Well, here’s the main house; here’s the guest house; there’s the studio and tool garden.” Rounds and rounds and rounds – obsessively round …
Round rooms are very interesting, because you define space by corners and a round room is halfway to infinity. It does have a floor and ceiling, but it was special.
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wright’s round house
The New York Times has some nice photos of the round house (actually, double-round house, with super-cool round carport) that famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1948. It’s now on the market for $1.5 million.
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round in the extreme
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366 square feet in 360 degrees
Christoph Kaiser and Shauna Thibault live in a refurbished grain silo: 366 square feet of circularity.
An architect, Kaiser designed and built the interior himself, and nearly everything — from the doors to the kitchen cabinets — is curved.
The space is small and open, and the couple thinks its intimacy has helped bring them closer together.
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round masterpiece for sale
Before the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in NYC, there was this spiraling house in Phoenix –
Iconic American architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house in 1952 for his son David, who lived in the house with his wife Gladys until their deaths (at ages 102 and 104, respectively). After it was sold out of the family in 2009, it faced possible demolition at the hands of a rapacious developer, but was saved by lawyer/builder Zach Rawling.
Advised by Wright historians and preservation architects, as well as by his architecture-loving mother, Rawling spent several years restoring the house and grounds. He tried to turn the house into a museum, but neighbors opposed the plan, fearing that the residential area would be harmed by excessive traffic.
Rawling explained the house’s greatness –
“Great buildings impact every sense and create an emotional reaction,” said Rawling. “Wright’s original plans for the David Wright House are labeled ‘How to Live in the Southwest.’ After two years of being on the property, I appreciate living in the desert more than I ever have growing up. The care with which he sited the house to relate to the surrounding environment is incredible. Wright was a genius at thinking spatially. There is a continuous dance of light and shadows on the house. It’s a natural extension of the environment.”
Besides its architectural cachet, the house features hand-cut Philippines mahogany, custom-designed furnishings, one of Wright’s signature “March Balloons” carpets, a shaded central courtyard, and a 360-square-foot guest house.
For somewhere south of $13 million, it could be yours.
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sauna with a view
The Chalet Sereno, in Megève, France, has a pretty cool hillside sauna –
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stranger in a strange house
Noted science fiction author Robert Heinlein designed and built this house –
Together with his wife Virginia, Heinlein lived in the house for 20 years, from 1967 to 1987.
A news article from 1985, calling it a “futuristic round house,” said that its 80 feet of book shelves displayed Heinlein’s own works, translated into 29 languages. It also noted that the author, “whose writings advocate space exploration and open marriage, has filled his home with photographs from the U.S. space program and artistic renderings of lithe women.”
The house is located in the Bonny Doon neighborhood of Santa Cruz, California.
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helicoid house
Yes, a circular house needs a spiral staircase –
St Andrews Beach House — located on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula, in Victoria — is just off the beach, next door to a national park. It has an open floor plan and views of the landscape in all directions.
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only eskimos and zulus
Hungarian-born British modernist architect Ernø Goldfinger wasn’t a fan of the circle.
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no front door
“The boundary between inner and outer space no longer exists,” explain the designers of this tiny, round, mobile, convertible house –
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sunflower house
A mid-century round house in Madison, Wisconsin, has just hit the market –
Built in 1952-53 by architect James Dresser, who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, the house has a central skylight, curved hallways, cork walls, a mix of wood and cork floors, and a round brick fireplace. It was for some years the architect’s family home.
Structurally, the house is a concrete shell built on a radial framework of curved steel beams. Stylistically, it’s both circular and angular, its round form accented by a series of triangular windows.
The innovative house was featured in a November 1952 edition of Popular Mechanics, which said, in something of rhetorical flourish, that “cobwebs will never collect in the corners” of the new house because “there aren’t any corners.”
A comparison of old and new photos show how the house has been altered over the years, though its basic shape remains unchanged, as do its amazing wood floors –
The original floor plan shows fun details like a round kitchen, round carport and round terrace, some of which no longer exist –
The asking price for the house is $449K.
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a concrete mushroom
Designed by architect George Bissell in 1963 as a demonstration house for a nationwide association of cement companies, this house was meant to prove that concrete homes were modern, inexpensive, and easy to maintain. A “concrete ‘mushroom,’ of unsurpassed strength and stability,” said the advertising brochure for the house, “it is a major step forward in the development of minimum-maintenance housing, as well as a satisfying esthetic achievement.”
The first house in the new master-planned community of Laguna Niguel, in Orange County, California, it was visited by thousands of people when it was first built. All concrete and glass, with a floating, scalloped concrete roof, it was unlike any other house in the neighborhood, either before or since. While it didn’t spark a craze for round, all-concrete homes, as its developers may have hoped, it did manage to find sympathetic owners who didn’t tear it down or renovate it beyond recognition.
Bought in 2005 by Einar Johnson and Pat Gough, two devoted fans of mid-century modern architecture, the house has been restored, enhanced, and polished to perfection.
Its curves are complemented by circular decks, a round hot tub, and plenty of curvaceous furniture. “Everything had to be round,” one of its owners explained in 2015. “Anything square just wouldn’t work here.”
An April 1964 advertisement for the house: “the welcome mat is out” –
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forest lookout
Be at one with nature in this circular tree house –
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crumbling communist icon
A striking circular structure, the communist-era Buzludzha Monument, in Bulgaria, has been allowed to fall apart –
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casa higienica
For these surreal times, a house that has been compared to the sought-after bathroom item many have stockpiled: Casa Barría, Panama –
Designed by Mallol & Wolfschoon in 1986, it was built in 1990.
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and what-have-you
Architect Rudolph Matern — sometimes working with architects Herman York, Samuel Paul and others — was responsible for the design of tens of thousands of suburban homes during the US’s post-WWII residential construction boom. He sold architectural drawings for single-family homes via ads in local papers, blueprint catalogs, and model home exhibitions.
Here is his design G-92, a circular vacation home with four extruding wings, advertised in 1967 –
The literal centerpiece of the house was its sunken circular lounge, “a kind of combination living room, family room and what-have-you” –
As far as I can ascertain, the design was never built.
Two years later he came out with another round house design, plan W69102, even more modern in emphasis –
I haven’t found a built version of this one, either.
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nothing square in nature
A 1920 article from the Victoria Daily, a Canadian newspaper, described the round houses designed by New Orleans architect C.N. Wisner. Pointing to the fact that “nature doesn’t make things square,” Wisner argued that it was wrong for people to live in square rooms in rectangular houses –
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