San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Designer draws on nature for inspiration
mean, yes, we are developers and are out to make a profit, but that is not what drives our process. We don’t even think about budget when we design something. We think about creating the greatest thing we can imagine, and an integral part of that is how that thing fits into the natural environment. I think our work in the end speaks for itself. For us, leaving something magnificent behind, that people can walk past, and it really makes them happy, just like when you first look at a magnificent piece of art, that’s everything to us.
Q: How do you go about selecting fits and finishes for a home? A: The materials must serve a purpose in terms of how we want a particular space to feel. Every room in our houses has something special about it. We try and always use natural materials like stone, wood, steel or concrete to speak to that. Stone, to me, is very emotional. We once took slabs of fossilized boulders from an ancient landslide and sandblasted them. We used them to panel the walls of a bathroom and it created this incredible three-dimensional effect that people really responded to.
Our Belvedere project has these incredible indoor/outdoor spas in some of the key bathrooms, and will be made from stone slabs with a leathered finish, which will make sitting in them feel soft, sexy and supple. Q: What enables you to have such substantial indoor/outdoor living designs?
A: We spend a lot of time researching the glazing of the windows and doors we use. We want massive openings, with transparent minimalistic frames, that allow us to literally have walls of glass that make the building feel sheltered, yet transparent. The selection of this type of window and door system has really taken us to the pinnacle of architecture and design. There are incredibly
expensive products out there that let you achieve incredible feats of engineering while providing the structural rigidity that is required for such massive open spaces.