new york

halfway to infinity

| round houses

Jack Lenor Larsen, a pioneering textile designer, designed and built a round house in East Hampton, NY, in the early 1960s –

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The house was inspired by his 1961 trip to South Africa, where he saw some of the traditional round houses of the Ndebele people. In an interview conducted years after he sold the house, Larsen described his design process, and some of his thoughts on living in the round –

[W]ith a round house, you can make a compass out of a piece of string, and Win and I said, “Well, here’s the main house; here’s the guest house; there’s the studio and tool garden.” Rounds and rounds and rounds – obsessively round …

Round rooms are very interesting, because you define space by corners and a round room is halfway to infinity. It does have a floor and ceiling, but it was special.

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take this house for a spin

| round houses

A spinning, earthquake and hurricane resistant, energy-efficient dome, with a Guggenheim-inspired spiral staircase is on the market in New Paltz –

 

If you’re not ready to buy it, you can rent it for the weekend. As the owners will tell you, spending time in the dome is liberating.

“People really do behave differently in the round space,” one of the owners says. “It’s just free. It’s free-flowing, free of walls, free of constraints. It’s a space, versus a room, versus a box. There’s no limitation.”

happy birthday frank lloyd wright & bruce goff!

| round houses

Two of the most creative architects ever to embrace the round form, Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, were both born on June 8—Wright in 1867, and Goff in 1904.

For Wright, the circular form symbolized freedom, an escape from the traditional residential box. As he explained in 1952, “a box is a containment. I tried to abolish the box.” Wright designed at least 14 round and semi-circular houses, as well as, most famously, the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in NYC. Not all of his round house designs were built; sadly, some of his most beautiful and innovative efforts never made it beyond the planning stage.

Wright’s 1938 project for Ralph Jester, meant for a suburban housing community in Palos Verdes, California, was his first attempt at a circular residence –

jester house plans

Another unbuilt round house was the Ludd M. Spivey house, which Wright designed during the same period.

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circle dreams

| round houses

The circle-studded facade of NYC’s Dream Downtown Hotel –

dream downtown hotel, NYC

The hotel is the latest incarnation of an iconic 1966 building designed by Louisiana architect Albert C. Ledner, known for a sort of playful, oddball modernism. Just off Ninth Avenue, stretching between West 16th and 17th Street, the building was recently transformed by Handel Architects. The building’s 16th Street facade, above, was covered in shiny stainless steel, as was its 17th Street facade (on the left, below, in its original red-brick cladding).

maritime hotel

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The building’s circular motif — equally in evidence in the adjoining Ledner-designed structure, the white tile and concrete Maritime Hotel — reflects the structure’s history. Both buildings were originally annexes to the headquarters of the National Maritime Union: the porthole windows were a coy reference to life at sea.

Ledner, whose use of circular forms extends from his professional to his personal life, or vice-versa, lives in a round house of his own design in New Orleans.

on the market

| round houses

You can find round and circular-form houses for sale right now in the US, UK, Australia and Canada for prices ranging from $87,500 to $10 million.  On the lavish — and arguably garish — end of the spectrum, there’s this 1980s luxury villa on Hamilton Island, in Australia, and the “Corbetta Estate” in Los Altos Hills, California (which was the cooler and much more fun Corbetta Party House in a former incarnation).

george keck house

Bringing up the low end of the market, at a modest 696 square feet in size, is one of the many small post-war round houses in Des Moines, Iowa.

A few other houses stand out –

You can also find two round houses for sale in the UK, one in Portland, Dorset, selling for £925,000, and the other in Sidmouth, Devon, selling for £849,950.