Collection by Akanksha Vishwakarma
Guest room
“As you can see, I’ve never been a minimalist,” says Nunnerley. She compares designing to being a jazz musician, working with the basics and then improvising. “We talk about riffs in jazz, and how those riffs appear in design, how you go up and down the scale, and make interesting juxtapositions.”
Pieces that might appear miscellaneous elsewhere create harmony here. The area around the fireplace includes a huge Senufo guardian bird sculpture from the Ivory Coast, a pair of 1930s Italian Osvaldo Borsani armchairs, and a curved, low table in eggshell-and-lacquer from the 1970s.
The stars of the living room are a pair of pink Bird chairs by Harry Bertoia for Knoll. Both the marble-topped occasional table and the wood table are vintage, the antique rugs are from Morocco, a Low Pad chair by Jasper Morrison for Cappellini sits near the fireplace, and the brass-and-steel coffee table was designed by Poorter and Holdrinet.
“Early in his career, Gehry was able to experiment with his own home—deconstructing rooms and functions into the shapes of the actual residence—and explore materials which are non-traditional,” says Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. “The Winton Guest House happens in ’87, and is the step between his own home and his commission at the University of Minnesota in ’90 where he moves his deconstructionist style toward what we see in ’97 in Bilbao.”
Gehry’s first project outside of California, the 2,300-square-foot guest house represented more than a geographic transition. According to Young, this home was a key moment for the evolution of Gehry’s style. At a time when Philip Johnson was designing that AT&T building and quintessential postmodern structures were being built, Gehry was “breaking apart the understanding of a building. That’s what postmodernists do, but not the way Gehry does. He was doing something completely different. With Winton, he breaks apart the building, but hasn’t cladded it in the same material. It’s a really pivotal moment of breaking apart the structure into these shapes.”
The Wintons commissioned Gehry after reading about his work in The New York Times in 1982. It was the pick of a client with premonition, and as the final structure indicates, an open mind. The architect was asked to create a space for the Wintons' visiting family—five kids and plenty of grandchildren necessitated the extra room—and complement the main home, a brick Philip Johnson “donut” on a 12-acre plot on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. But Gehry followed his own muse, and often talked about the home he created as pure sculpture, according to Victoria Young, the Professor of Modern Architectural History at St. Thomas University and Coordinator of Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House. “Even the original models have all these disparate shapes,” she says. “The first model he presented to them had a log cabin, referencing the fact that the Wintons' fortune came from Canadian lumber." Since it was a guest house, Gehry felt free to experiment. "You can explore things in a way you can’t in a place people live in all the time.”
Remodeled by resident and interior decorator Jill McCoy and her husband David Hassall with the help of architect Paul Molina, the open-plan living space opens to a small outdoor area. French doors and a wall of windows bring in light. An Eames lounge chair and a Noguchi table add a modern sensibility.
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