伦敦市中心“倒置之家” | 现代主义大师芭芭拉·韦斯的设计杰作

Our film series is back, and this time were visiting the upside-down home of architect Barbara Weiss, who lives with her husband, property developer Alan Leibowitz, in a converted pub in Westminster, central London. Check out the film here.

As head

of her self-named practice, Weiss oversees a spectrum of different projects,

which might take the form of a reimagined listed family house in north London,

the sensitive restoration of Norman Shaw’s 1882 home (now part of Imperial

College), or work on the Wiener Library, the worlds oldest Holocaust memorial

institution. Tying them all together is a simple, clean touch, one in which her

love of modernist greats like Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray makes itself known

through minimal detailing and in-built functionality.

When it

came to her own home, Weiss decided to undertake the ambitious task of

converting a one-time pub in the heart of Westminster after 25 years of living

in a Victorian terrace in Islington, north London. “I loved it, but one morning

I emerged from the tube at Green Park and felt I was missing the best of

London. Alan had been brought up in South Africa, in a big house in the

suburbs, so he was happy, but I wanted to be back at the heart of things,” she

told

magazine in 2014.

Placing

themselves in the thick of it came with the challenge of carving out privacy

and a garden from the building, which had been used as offices as well since it

was built in 1927. The solution was to design an upside-down house, one in

which the top floors are given over to the core living spaces and roof garden,

and the street-viewing ground floors reserved for bedrooms and ancillary

spaces.  

Weiss’ affinity for modernist architecture drove much of the design, with a Corbusier staircase pinched from his Fondation in Paris being “the vertical thread that connects these floors”, and an honest material palette that preferences natural choices like cedar, oak, marble and bronze.

Step

inside Weiss’ design and hear her thoughts on urban gardening, good interior

design and modern living by watching the film now. And don’t forget to

subscribe to our YouTube channel where

you can step into the homes of Ruth and Richard Rogers, Deyan Sudjic, Roger Zogolovitch and

many more.

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