Mountain House

Informationen zum Autor Nina Freudenberger Klappentext "A stunning photographic collection of mountain houses around the world that incorporate the surrounding ranges and vistas into their designs, from the author of Surf Shack and Bibliostyle. From Morocco to Patagonia, and Brazil to New Hampshire, interior designer Nina Freudenberger presents some of the most spectacular homes hidden in mountainous regions around the world, including modern lodges, rustic hideaways, hillside chalets, and more. Explore mountain living at its best in fall, winter, spring, and summer with 200 beautiful full-color images of each home. Among the twenty homes featured in this book, you'll find an isolated villa nestled in Switzerland's Engadin Valley; a former U.S. Forest Service cabin in California's San Gabriel Mountains; a modern concrete getaway just outside of Mexico City; and a renovated home in the Catskills built as a hotel for artists in the late 1800s. With simply designed interiors that keep the focus on the view just outside the window, these homes epitomize the tranquility and isolation we seek in the wilderness and the design ingenuity that mountain life demands"-- Leseprobe Introduction As an interior designer, I have always been fascinated not only with how people live but also where they choose to live and why. This curiosity brought me to surfing locales around the world in the making of my first book Surf Shack and into the most interesting and expansive home libraries in my second book, Bibliostyle . As someone who lives in the city and loves to travel with my family, I couldn't help being interested in homes perched in the highest altitudes. How do we define a mountain house? You might imagine a quaint wooden cottage surrounded by pines, maybe with a stone chimney and billowing smoke, but what I found while working alongside the photographer Chris Mottalini and writer Michael Snyder was just how many ways there are to live with and design for the mountains. A mountain house may not even represent escape to some homeownersseveral of the homes we found are primary residences. Some are even located in major world cities. People have occupied the mountains for just about as long as humans have been around. For nearly 50,000 years, we have had ancestors sheltering under rocks more than 10,000 feet above sea level, and many of our most ancient gods have resided in the mountains. Religious seekers, guerrilla warriors, and political dissidents alike have all treated mountains as retreats from the world, building stupas and monasteries into impossible rockfaces, or establishing alternative societies in the folds of hills where lowland powers can't reach. It's not a coincidence that some of the most biologically, culturally, and linguistically diverse places on earth are mountainous. Mountains seem intimidating, even scary, to those of us who were born and raised at sea level. They remind us of how small we really are, which makes them practically divine. For the most part the houses included in this book were built, in one way or another, in that ancient tradition of retreat. There are now eight billion people in the world and more than half of us live in cities, which has turned wilderness from something to marvel at or fear into something that many of us yearn for. Some of these houses bring nature close through design choices, such as using organic materials like stone and wood sourced near the homes. Other homeowners quite literally brought the outside in by erecting porous walls or, in some cases, eliminating doors and windows altogether, leaving blank apertures that open to the surrounding landscape. Some of the houses were built with the understandingradical to city dwellers, logical to everyone elsethat everything goes back into the earth. These houses will one day be part of the mountains themselves. In choosing these homes, we weren't...

Auteur

Nina Freudenberger

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A photographic study of more than twenty houses and the mountain landscapes, from alpine forests to urban peaks, that embrace them.

Spanning continents and climates, the twenty homes presented in interior designer Nina Freudenberger's latest book challenge and expand the idea of what a mountain house might be. Artist retreats in Morocco's High Atlas and the snowy folds of the Engadine Valley in Switzerland speak to the long tradition of mountains spaces for contemplation and creation, while modernist masterworks in Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro expand the traditional image of log cabins and rustic chalets.

Depicted in over 200 images, these houses include brutalist lodges, clapboard cottages, and minimalist prisms set down among some of the world's most dramatic landscapes. In their spectacular diversity, they express the radical ingenuity and stunning creativity that the mountains have always inspired.