Inside a Legendary Modernist Home Designed to Flow Like a Waterfall

Architectural Digest

Today, AD travels to Vancouver, Canada, to tour Eppich House II. Designed in the 1980s by renowned Canadian architect Arthur Erickson for businessman Hugo Eppich, this home uses rigid materials to create soft, organic forms. Curved steel layers cascade down the landscape like a waterfall, while an abundance of windows flood the home with natural light. Everything in the house, from the landscape to the furniture, was designed by Erickson’s collaborators and has been beautifully preserved. This home is a feat in modernist architecture and is considered one of Erickson’s best designs.

Transcript

00:00There's one difficult German word that applies to this house, and it says everything about

00:11it.

00:12Gesamtkunstwerk.

00:13The total artwork, the total design, that is the theme of this house.

00:19That's what drove Arthur to design everything, soup to nuts, in this house.

00:25The house itself is a kind of museum of how to take a limited number of geometric motifs

00:33and a few materials.

00:35The discipline of limiting your palette is what gives this house its power.

00:45My name's Trevor Bodie.

00:46I'm an architecture critic and curator and a longtime friend and colleague of Arthur

00:51Erickson.

00:53Arthur Erickson is Canada's most famous and influential architect ever, in print.

00:59And I think this house is particularly interesting as an expression of Arthur Erickson's values,

01:05his ideas, even his personal life.

01:08It's called Epic Two House because it's the second house for someone called Epic.

01:13Twin brothers from Slovenia, German-speaking chaps who came to Canada in the 1950s, and

01:22they established an extremely successful business of iron manufacturing operation

01:30called Ebco.

01:32Arthur Erickson did a first house for the older brother, Helmut, in concrete.

01:37When Arthur did Epic One for Helmut and then Epic Two for Hugo, he wasn't doing many houses.

01:44He got very busy doing public buildings, and Arthur relented because these houses, both

01:49of them, are experiments in building materials.

01:53Also, they were very wealthy clients, and they could indulge Arthur's experiments and

01:58that of his collaborating partner, Francisco Krepacz.

02:02And in this house, you have the full-bore collaboration of Arthur Erickson as the architect

02:08designing the main spaces, and Francisco designing nearly all of the steel embellishments, the

02:15chairs, the candlesticks, the details, and so on.

02:19And the amazing thing here is that they were a couple for a long, long time.

02:24Arthur met him when he was 19, and they were together for the whole life.

02:27What Arthur did is what he did elsewhere, is he made the site.

02:31He reconstructed it.

02:33There's not an original piece of slope or anything here.

02:37It was made and shaped and reconfigured to make it the worthy location for this shining

02:43steel house.

02:49We're in the living dining room.

02:56It's a pretty magnificent room.

02:58You can't go wrong with this view down the hill to the Pacific Ocean.

03:03As we come in, you see the chrome-plated columns.

03:07They're in the room.

03:08They're like people.

03:09These columns have a presence, and they give you a kind of perspective view of the house.

03:15We don't have very hot summers.

03:17We have quite mild winters.

03:19So what we're starving for is not heat but light.

03:24So Arthur's philosophy was to increase the amount of windows on all sides.

03:30First of all, you see the rolled steel structure into which is set glass block.

03:37There's another house, and they look down on this.

03:40So Arthur came up with the notion of the glass blocks, which allows the light in but block

03:46direct view.

03:47So it's a very ingenious little detail.

03:54Where do the curves come from?

03:55This is the first question I usually get asked.

03:57Why do the curve?

03:58He wanted to do something different.

04:00He liked the sensuality of the curve, and the notion is like cascades of water coming

04:05down from the mountains.

04:06He liked the organic form.

04:08It was a middle term between steel and forest.

04:12And then it becomes an almost obsessive theme throughout the house.

04:16I'm sitting on a round chair.

04:18Curves everywhere.

04:28Now this is a chrome column, glass-walled steel house.

04:35So the issue here is to make things more warm and livable.

04:38And Erickson's done a few things to make that happen.

04:41First of all, the ceiling is stripping of British Columbia cedar, warmly colored, beautiful

04:48local wood.

04:49Similarly, the floor is a limestone that was imported from Germany that's used here, indeed

04:56is used on the exterior deck.

04:58Warm colored.

04:59It even has little vestiges of trilobites and shells in it.

05:04So it's a very interesting stone.

05:06It's very nice that in the house is artwork by the eldest of the epic boys, the eldest

05:12boy Egon, who was an artist, a painter, and a sculptor.

05:17And all through this house and his brother's house, you have paintings by this very significant

05:21artist who was shown all over Europe.

05:24More custom details by Francisco in the dining room.

05:27This dining room chair is a variation on a kind of Biedermeier concept, a curved back

05:34chair with its strung metal structure.

05:37You can almost play it like a harp with a structural piece in here to keep it straight.

05:43Somewhat bizarrely, we have placemats manufactured in a steel factory, an all steel placemat

05:53with two wing sections for your cutlery.

05:56The plate goes here, lifted up off the table.

06:00It weighs about 10 pounds.

06:02I've never seen an all metal placemat before.

06:05Finally, a little bonbon tray, again, circular with the little details on it.

06:15This house has two wings.

06:17The main wing with the levels of the house stacked on each other.

06:21Then there's a cross axis for the pool and a structure that goes over the pool.

06:26And the two come together like this, and they're open to the south.

06:31That means the main house here behind me is facing southwest, which is exactly what

06:36you want in this climate.

06:37Afternoon light, light that will come to the living room, come into the dining room when

06:42you're eating.

06:43It's the best orientation.

06:45Hugo Eppich and Brigitte's wife love forests, and they love nature, and they wanted water.

06:51Water feature was so important to them.

06:53So that became a structure of the whole layout of the site.

06:58And then they had enough room now to make a pond.

07:00There are three or four different reflecting pools if you want.

07:04So water is at every corner of this house.

07:09Arthur really believed in having water around his buildings because in this gray climate,

07:15light reflects off the water surface and illuminates the building in a dramatic way.

07:28We're now in a realm which is Arthur Erickson's creation together with his landscape architect,

07:34Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

07:38As Arthur Erickson is to architecture in Canada, Cornelia is to landscape architect.

07:43In fact, she got the equivalent of the Pritzker or the Nobel Prize for landscape architecture

07:49worldwide.

07:50With these things fixed, this was already all in place, she then realizes it in terms

07:55of planting, detailing, making it live.

07:59So all of the flowers and bushes around me here, all specified by her, often very subtle.

08:06She didn't want bright color.

08:08The white blossoms enforced the white steel, etc.

08:12To find a humble landscape architect who doesn't want to blow the architecture out of the water

08:16but to enforce it, you can really see Cornelia's brilliance in the plants she specified and

08:24shrubs and locations of water, etc.

08:27People come here and say, oh, how on earth did he find such a great site?

08:30Well, you don't find a great site like this, you make it.

08:39This is Helmut and Bridget Eppich's own bedroom.

08:43To me, as a critic and a sleeper, it's a bit too big.

08:47I've had apartments the size of this bedroom.

08:50Here it's custom furniture again, designed by Francisco, in a turquoise leather.

08:55And it's a color you don't often see in furniture, but I think it works quite well with the setting

09:01with the glass.

09:03And there's a headboard behind the bed, which is very clever, it's just part-rounded strips

09:09of leather on the wall to give a little bit of texture and a little bit of life in the

09:14room with built-in lights, adjustable.

09:23This is actually my favorite bedroom in the house, and it's actually a kid's bedroom.

09:28It's more intimate, it's smaller in size, and from my view, it's got even better vistas.

09:33On this side, there's a forest primeval, and in fact, this room is cantilevered, it's floating

09:39in the air above the natural landscape.

09:43So as a kid, I would love that, I would dream about that all night.

09:46And here, out into the garden, yet another deck, even at the children's level, there's

09:52a beautiful deck out into the garden, an amazing space.

10:06Arthur called it the plastic use of steel.

10:10Steel is usually the least plastic material going.

10:13Concrete's plastic, it's liquid and it forms and it solidifies.

10:17Steel is pretty different.

10:19But he wanted almost a contradiction of terms.

10:23So the elegance of the arches coming down is also a way to cut back the mass.

10:31Those curves live very well with the forest behind me.

10:35Even though he's doing a non-natural material, he's using steel in a very naturalizing way.

10:42And I think this shows you the brilliance of an architect doing things counterintuitively.

10:52One of the great themes of Arthur Erickson's architecture is the dialogue between form,

10:57between buildings, and landscape.

11:00One of the things that Arthur invented to do this is something he called the flying

11:05beam.

11:06Beams that extend out from a house into space.

11:09They are meant to be devices to look through, to link being on the deck to the forest behind.

11:16The flying beam is a visual connection between inside and outside, between civilization and

11:22nature.

11:23And often people don't understand Erickson's brilliance until they walk it on the site,

11:29and then they get it.

11:30They go, why is this guy better known?

11:34I now see what he's up to.

11:36It's not just the house, it's the house and the garden.

11:39It's the house and the garden and the broader landscape, the hills.

11:42House and the garden and the mountains and the ocean.

11:45You start to make these equations more and more rich.

11:50There's a protege of Arthur, an architect called Nick Milkovich, who is on the site

12:05almost monthly for the last 30 years.

12:08So anytime something needed doing, he was here.

12:11And Nick Milkovich ended up designing a studio pavilion, a new building for Hugo and Bridget

12:18in the garden.

12:23This is the studio, or sometimes called the guest house.

12:26Hugo used to come down the hill and sit by the pond, especially early in the morning

12:31or at sunset, and look back at the house.

12:34And he wanted to come down here in inclement weather to get out of the rain or in cold

12:39days get warm.

12:40So the challenge to Nick was to make a small little pavilion that would not distract from

12:45the main house, but it would be big enough to sleep in or to have a few people over for

12:51drinks or dinner has become a much loved part of the ensemble.

12:56What I really admire about what Nick Milkovich has done here is he did not imitate the details

13:02of the main house.

13:05And you can see Hugo and Bridget can lie there and look back on the house and you can see

13:09the love affair that these clients are having with what Arthur Erikson created for them.

13:15In other words, the point where they will want to have a bedroom that literally looks

13:19back upon the house that they created.

13:33The thing about the epic house is that this was Arthur's great love letter to his partner

13:39in design, Francisco Krepes.

13:43He let Francisco go farther and deeper in this design than anywhere else.

13:49And it was an act of love.

13:51And even though when people first see it, it's cold and glass and steel, but we start

13:56to understand the stories and the thought that went into it, it all of a sudden it kind

14:00of warms up.

14:02The house is a testament to their collaboration.

14:05And when people understand that story, the house becomes something different.

14:08It gets warmer, it gets more complex.

14:11That's the hidden secret of the epic, too.

14:14Hugo and Bridget Epic have had decades of pleasure in this house.

14:19The house tells them things about the forest, tells them things about the track of light.

14:25This house is a sophisticated engine for living.

14:30It's a view machine.

14:32It's an optical device where you live on the inside and look on the outside.

14:36And then when we go out and enjoy the garden, you have the reverse.

Category

Transcript

Recommended