 |
Antonio Foscari with the Hadid sculpture in his Palladian villa |
Officially named Villa Foscari, the house is more commonly known as La Malcontenta. This is not, as rumours have it, for the sad-looking woman in one of its interior frescoes or for the unhappy, imprisoned wife of an early owner but for the village in which it sits, itself named after the bands of brigands and outcasts – malcontents – who gathered there during the time of the Venetian republic.
It is a classic Palladian villa: cuboid and symmetrical over three floors with an interesting cruciform internal design. The symmetry allowed the Foscari brothers to have matching apartments. Huge ionic columns on the façade are flanked by a striking double staircase that adds an extra layer of imposing grandeur.
Antonio Foscari did not grow up in the house but acquired it in 1973 after it had been out of his family for well over a century. “It is a curiosity of history that I have been able to buy it again. It is a scherzo – a joke. But it is important too because it helps people realise that it is a house designed for a family, not just a monument.”
Indeed, throughout the world there are houses designed by history’s most celebrated architects, the men considered national treasures in their own countries, that are not just preserved but also lived in and loved by full-time owners and residents like Foscari.
Chance to own a landmark
Wealthy property hunters in search of a piece of US architectural history need look no further than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (right), on sale for $15m through Hilton & Hyland Real Estate, Dilbeck Realtors and Christie’s Great Estates, writes Edwin Heathcote and Jillian Reid.
Located in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles, its movie career has rivalled that of many Tinseltown stars, with appearances in films such as the original House on Haunted Hill, Blade Runner, The Replacement Killers, Black Rain and The Karate Kid . Yet the house also stands as a tantalising trailer – a weird and compelling monument to an embryonic US architecture that Wright abandoned for a more modernist phase.
Along with his Hollyhock House, it represented an astonishing change in language for the architect. If his earlier Prairie Houses were about horizontal planes stretching into the landscape, the Ennis House was an extension of the rock, a craggy castle growing from the hill with the archetypal forms of Mayan pyramids and proto-art-deco set-backs and steps that would influence later US skyscrapers.
Badly damaged in the 1994 earthquake and rainstorms of 2004 and 2005, it now appears from the street below as a ruin, a remnant of some wonderful lost civilisation. The owner, the non-profit Ennis House Foundation, says it can no longer afford the repairs and renovations the property needs so hopes to sell to a private owner.
All try to use the houses as they would have been used when new. So La Malcontenta continues to be a flexible entity, with rooms not dedicated to a single function but used as a bedroom one day, a dining room the next. The aging frescoes that depict scenes from Ovid on the walls are fading but Foscari refuses to cover them or put them behind glass. Most strikingly, he has put his own contemporary stamp on the property, installing, for example, a massive abstract sculpture resembling a snail’s shell that he asked UK-based architect Zaha Hadid to create as a response to the frescoed room. “Palladio was a prophet of modernity.” Foscari says. “He gave a new language to all of society – not just to one pope or one aristocrat but for everyone. [The architecture] is eternal, not for one time. It allows you to discover something that springs eternal in life. What is durable is the ability to create beauty.”
The Hadid sculpture highlights the continuation of that sort of thinking.
. . .
The British equivalent of Palladio, the finest designer of homes in the UK, would probably be Scottish architect Robert Adam, whose work is in fact a “soft” interpretation of the Italian’s neo-classicism.
In the 1760s he was employed by the Marquess of Lansdowne, who later became prime minister, to remodel his house, Bowood, in Wiltshire, western England. Over nine years the architect redesigned what is now the main house, building the family and reception rooms, previously housed in a separate building that has since been demolished. One of the new rooms became the laboratory in which Joseph Priestley identified oxygen in 1774.
He also added an orangery, which was very fashionable at the time, a menagerie, where exotic creatures such as a leopard and an orangutan were kept, and a family mausoleum.
Bowood’s frontage, inspired by Adam’s survey of the palace of the emperor Diocletian at Split, Croatia, is some of his best work; the yellow glow of the local stone projects gentle grandeur rather than Romanesque imperial power. But it is not the feature that the current Lord Lansdowne, Bowood’s modern-day proprietor, loves most about the house.
“The mausoleum is my favourite of Adam’s work [here],” he says, striding across the grounds. “It’s a gem – pure romantic perfection. And it’s where my family are buried, so it’s an important building emotionally for me.”
 |
| Robert Adam’s Bowood House |
He has installed a golf course and small hotel at Bowood to keep the estate running but its main attractions are still its history, Adam’s involvement and the day-to-day lives of its former occupants. “There is great interest in what they did, how they did it, what they could or couldn’t afford,” Lansdowne explains. “It brings it alive.”
. . .
If Adam epitomises residential architecture in the UK, the man who symbolises US home design is without question Frank Lloyd Wright. Named in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as “the greatest American architect of all time”, he did produce landmark public buildings, such as the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, but he is best remembered as a designer of modern, open-plan houses for young, upwardly mobile, middle-class families. They are buildings that were wide and low, with the interiors open to the environment outside so movement from one to the other would be slight, liminal and organic.
In the 1950s Wright was able to realise his vision of the future for American life when a group of young professionals banded together to buy some land on which to form a co-operative community. They picked the village of Pleasantville in New York and their community came to be named Usonia, after Wright’s “US-style” houses.
 |
| Frank Lloyd Wright’s Reisley House |
To their surprise the famous architect read their five-page letter and agreed to design their house. “When I went to see him I was pretty nervous about breathing the great man’s air,” jokes Reisley, who used a wedding present of $2,500 intended for a European honeymoon as his fee to join the community. “But he said to me: ‘Roland, you are the client; I am your architect. I will keep designing and redesigning your house until you are happy but you have to tell me what you want. Otherwise you will take what you get.’ ”
The resulting design grows out of the landscape. When the Reisleys outlined their plans to set their house on top of a hill, his reply was: “Oh no. That would just be a house on a hill. To experience the hill, be of the hill, you must build into it.”
That was in 1950 and, although Ronny died in 2006, Reisley still lives in the house. “We never really thought of it in terms of America’s architectural history,” he says. “It was our family home and it has been my home for nearly 60 years. But I feel more like a steward of this house as time goes on. When I had been living here about 20 years I realised that every day I had noticed something new. Of course bad things have happened, like in any home, but every day I have noticed something new and beautiful about it.”
