Grass Lawn

Minimalism, adjusted for real life.

The clients were drawn to Japanese restraint and Scandinavian warmth, but the house also had to hold the way they actually live: cooking, working from home, listening to music, and keeping everyday things out of sight.

What came out of that is a quieter kind of minimalism. Storage disappears into the walls, lighting is designed to recede, and every material in the house has a practical reason to be there.

The theme that runs through the whole house is things that disappear. The entry wardrobe reads as a wall panel. Shelving is set into the window niches, where it also hides some awkward geometry left over from the architecture. Lighting runs in coves and profiles instead of fixtures you look at.

What stays visible is deliberately short: oak, plaster, stone, linen, and the plants. Nothing in these rooms has to work hard to belong, because there is not much for it to compete with.

The ground floor is one room that changes as you walk through it: entry, living, dining, kitchen, with the stair open in the middle of it.

The fireplace is the hinge. It is clad in large format porcelain and continues sideways into a window ledge that works as a bench and a shelf at the same time, which is how this room gets storage without a cabinet on show.

There is no television in the living room. A compact baby grand took the wall a screen would normally have, and the seating turned to face it, so the room is organized around listening rather than watching.

Both clients work in tech and often from home, so the plan also carries a shared office nook by the stair and a second, casual place to work upstairs. Neither is a room. Both are enough.

The kitchen is the part of this house that was worked hardest. One of the clients cooks Chinese food most days, which means high heat, steam and oil, so every surface that takes the hit is stone, including all four sides of the hood.

The hood started as plaster. It became stone partly for durability and partly because it lets the hood read as one piece with the backsplash instead of an object hanging on the wall. The upper cabinets are glass with lighting inside them, which keeps the wall from closing in, and the island carries the prep run and the table in one move.

Upstairs the same rules apply with fewer elements. A slatted oak wall runs behind the bed and turns into the nightstands, so nothing stands loose against it, and a light cove above it does the work a ceiling fixture would.

A window niche was rebuilt as shelving, the bench motif repeats here as it does downstairs, and the closet was redrawn after the first visualization to hold more without reading as heavier.

The bathroom went through more revisions than anything else here. The mirror wall is built in and lit from both sides, and the position and temperature of that light were adjusted through close to twenty rounds before the reflection was good enough to put on makeup in.

The tub started built in and ended up freestanding, which gave the floor back and let the stone run without interruption. A wooden niche holds the small daily things so the counter can stay empty.