Inside A Legendary Modernist Home Designed To Flow Like A Waterfall | Architectural Digest

There's one difficult German word that applies to this house and it says everything about it. The total artwork, the total design, that is the theme of this house. That's what drove Arthur to design everything, soup to nuts, in this house. The house itself is a kind of museum of how to take a limited number of geometric motifs and a few materials. The discipline of limiting your palette is what gives this house its power. My name is Trevor Bode. I'm an architecture critic and curator and a longtime friend and colleague of Arthur Erickson. Arthur Erickson is Canada's most famous and influential architect ever in print and I think this house is particularly interesting as an expression of Arthur Erickson's values, his ideas, even his personal life. It's called Epic Two House because it's the second house for someone called Epic. Twin brothers from Slovenia, German-speaking chaps who came to Canada in the 1950s and they established an extremely successful business of iron manufacturing operation called Ebco. Arthur Erickson did a first house for the older brother Helmut in concrete. When Arthur did Epic One for Helmut and then Epic Two for Hugo, he wasn't doing many houses. He got very busy doing public buildings and Arthur relented because these houses, both of them, are experiments in building materials. Also, they were very wealthy clients and they could indulge Arthur's experiments and that of his collaborating partner, Francisco Krepacz. And in this house, you have the full bore collaboration of Arthur Erickson as the architect designing the main spaces and Francisco designing nearly all of these steel embellishments, the chairs, the candlesticks, the details and so on. And the amazing thing here is that they were a couple for a long, long time. Arthur met him when he was 19 and they were together for the whole life. What Arthur did is what he did elsewhere, is he made the site. He reconstructed it. There's not an original piece of slope or anything here. It was made and shaped and reconfigured to make it the worthy location for this shining steel house. We're in the living dining room. It's a pretty magnificent room. You can't go wrong with this view down the hill to the Pacific Ocean. As we come in, you see the chrome-plated columns. They're in the room. They're like people. These columns have a presence and they give you a kind of perspective view of the house. We don't have very hot summers. We have quite mild winters. So what we're starving for is not heat but light. So Arthur's philosophy was to increase the amount of windows on all sides. First of all, you see the roll it steel structure into which is set glass block. There's another house and they look down on this. So Arthur came up with the notion of the glass blocks which allows the light in but block direct view. So it's a very ingenious little detail. Where do the curves come from? This is the first question I usually get asked. Why do the curve? He wanted to do something different. He liked the sensuality of the curve and the notion is like cascades of water coming down from the mountains. He liked the organic form. It was a middle term between steel and forest and then it becomes an almost obsessive theme throughout the house. I'm sitting on a round chair. Curves everywhere. Now this is a chrome column glass-walled steel house. So the issue here is to make things more warm and livable and Erickson's done a few things to make that happen. First of all, the ceiling is stripping of British Columbia cedar, warmly colored, beautiful local wood. Similarly, the floor is a limestone that was imported from Germany that's used here. Indeed, it's used on the exterior deck. Warm colored. It even has little vestiges of trilobites and shells in it. So it's a very interesting stone and it's very nice that in the house is artwork by the eldest of the epic boys, the eldest boy, Egon, who was an artist, a painter, and a sculptor. And all through this house and his brother's house you have paintings by this very significant artist who was shown all over Europe. More custom details by Francisco in the dining room. This dining room chair is a variation on a kind of Biedermeier concept. A curved back chair with its strung metal structure. You can almost play it like a harp with a structural piece in here to keep it straight. Somewhat bizarrely, we have placemats manufactured in a steel factory. An all-steel placemat with two wing sections for your cutlery. The plate goes here, lifted up off the table. It weighs about 10 pounds. I've never seen an all-metal placemat before. Finally, a little bonbon tray. Again, circular with the little details on it. This house has two wings. The main wing with the levels of the house stacked on each other. Then there's a cross axis for the pool and a structure that goes over the pool. And the two come together like this. And they're open to the south. That means the main house here behind me is facing southwest, which is exactly what you want in this climate. Afternoon light, light that will come to the living room, come into the dining room when you're eating. It's the best orientation. Hugo Epoch and Bridget, his wife, love forests and they love nature and they wanted water. Water feature was so important to them. So that became a structure of the whole layout of the site. And then they had enough room now to make a pond. There are three or four different reflecting pools if you want. So water is at every corner of this house. Arthur really believed in having water around his buildings because in this gray climate, light reflects off the water surface and illuminates the building in a dramatic way. We're now in a realm which is Arthur Erickson's creation together with his landscape architect, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. As Arthur Erickson is to architecture in Canada, Cornelia is to landscape architect. In fact, she got the equivalent of the Pritzker or the Nobel Prize for landscape architecture worldwide. With these things fixed, this is already all in place. She then realizes it in terms of planting, detailing, making it live. So all of the flowers and bushes around me here, all specified by her, often very subtle. She didn't want bright color. The white blossoms enforced the white steel, etc. To find a humble landscape architect who doesn't want to blow the architecture out of the water, but to enforce it. You can really see Cornelia's brilliance in the plants she specified and shrubs and locations of water, etc. People come here and say, oh, how on earth did he find such a great site? Well, you don't find a great site like this. You make it. This is Helmut and Bridget Epic's own bedroom. To me, as a critic and a sleeper, it's a bit too big. I've had apartments the size of this bedroom. Here, it's custom furniture again, designed by Francisco, in a turquoise leather. And it's a color you don't often see in furniture, but I think it works quite well with the setting with the glass. And there's a headboard behind the bed, which is very clever. It's just part rounded strips of leather on the wall to give a little bit of texture and a little bit of life in the room with built-in lights adjustable. This is actually my favorite bedroom in the house. And it's actually a kid's bedroom. It's more intimate, smaller in size. And from my view, it's got even better vistas. On this side, there's a forest primeval. And in fact, this room is cantilever. It's floating in the air above the natural landscape. So as a kid, I would love that. I would dream about that all night. And here out into the garden, yet another deck, even at the children's level, there's a beautiful deck out into the garden, an amazing space. Arthur called it the plastic use of steel. Steel is usually the least plastic material going. Concrete's plastic. It's liquid and it forms and it solidifies. Steel is pretty different. But he wanted almost a contradiction of terms. So the elegance of the arches coming down is also a way to cut back the mass. Those curves live very well with the forest behind me. Even though he's doing a non-natural material, he's using steel in a very naturalizing way. And I think this shows you the brilliance of an architect doing things counterintuitively. One of the great themes of Arthur Erickson's architecture is the dialogue between built form, between buildings and landscape. One of the things that Arthur invented to do this is something he called the flying beam. Beams that extend out from a house into space. They are meant to be devices to look through, to link being on the deck to the force behind. The flying beam is a visual connection between inside and outside, between civilization and nature. And often people don't understand Erickson's brilliance until they walk it on the site. Then they get it. They go, why is this guy not better known? I now see what he's up to. It's not just the house. It's the house and the garden. It's the house and the garden and the broader landscape, the hills. House and the garden and the mountains and the ocean. You start to make these equations more and more rich. There's a protege of Arthur, an architect called Nick Milkovich, who is on the site almost monthly for the last 30 years. So anytime something needed doing, he was here. And Nick Milkovich ended up designing a studio pavilion, a new building for Hugo and Bridget in the garden. This is the studio or sometimes called the guest house. Hugo used to come down the hill and sit by the pond, especially early in the morning or at sunset, and look back at the house. And he wanted to come down here in inclement weather to get out of the rain or cold days get warm. So the challenge to Nick was to make a small little pavilion that would not distract from the main house, but it would be big enough to sleep in or to have a few people over for drinks or dinner has become a much loved part of the ensemble. What I really admire about what Nick Milkovich has done here is he did not imitate the details of the main house. And you can see Hugo and Bridget can lie there and look back on the house and you can see the love affair that these clients are having with what Arthur Ericson created for them. In other words, the point where they will want to have a bedroom that literally looks back upon the house that they created. The thing about the epic house is that this was Arthur's great love letter to his partner in design, Francisco Krepes. He let Francisco go farther and deeper in this design than anywhere else. And it was an act of love. And even though when people first see it, it's cold and glass and steel. But when you start to understand the stories and the thought that went into it, it all of a sudden it kind of warms up. The house is a testament to their collaboration. And when people understand that story, the house becomes something different. It gets warmer, it gets more complex. That's the hidden secret of the epic too. Hugo and Bridget epic have had decades of pleasure in this house. The house tells them things about the forest, tells them things about the track of light. This house is a sophisticated engine for living. It's a view machine. It's an optical device where you live on the inside and look on the outside. And then when we go out and enjoy the garden, you have the reverse.