A sudden crash of winter rain has sweetened the air but left the Venice sky moody and one-dimensional. Yet, by the time the 96 colored and clear windows of architect Lorcan O'Herlihy's Vertical House have translated the flattened light, the atmosphere has the filtered-lens opalescence of a period romance film.
Faint blurs of green and blue soften the white of the living room wall. A blast of gold falls across the kitchen floor. Pearly reflections play off the pots and pans hanging in a careful composition above the stove.
Every detail of every room seems at once to be divinely washed by a spiritual calm and energized by felicitous surprises. Look beneath a built-in cabinet that floats above the floor and you spot a tiny window. ("I think good architecture allows for accidents to happen," O'Herlihy says cryptically.)
Look at all the windows, staggered in a fragmented, asymmetrical, deceptively off-handed way, and you'll recognize them not as just windows, but as framed art. Each one isolates a small piece of the cityscape -- the top of a palm frond, the edge of a balcony, the tiled sculpture of roof, a sliver of ocean. You take notice, and by noticing, you appreciate. By appreciating, you see things in a new way. A drain pipe you might have thought mundane and ugly becomes exotic and beautiful in the singling out of its upper curve.
The narrowness and canny placement of the windows on all four sides give the three-story space a profound sense of openness without the sacrifice of privacy. You're sheltered but also connected to the world -- the architectural formula for well-being and just what a good house ought to do.
Here, in this compact private residence that O'Herlihy shares with his gracious Irish-born wife, Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, a stage and screen actress, and their regal rescued cat, Jasper, is a seamless uniting of art and architecture, restraint and irrepressibility, rationality and soul. It's a harmony of yin-and-yang opposites that blends into a lucid, eloquent simplicity.
"It's really, really difficult to be simple," says architect Lawrence Scarpa, who, with O'Herlihy, was named this year by the Architectural League of New York as one of eight "critical emerging voices of architecture" in the United States. "Lorcan finds incredibly interesting things in the most simple ideas."
It becomes evident straightaway why the 45-year-old O'Herlihy has achieved international status as an architect, why he is "definitely up-and-coming -- one of the ones to watch," says Morphosis and Southern California Institute of Architecture co-founder Thom Mayne. "He's one the most thoughtful, intelligent architects working in L.A., always exploring and doing interesting, committed work."
O'Herlihy is probably best known for his inventive use of materials. To design his cabinetry he used colored plywood and created a Cubist design that resembles a Mondrian painting. The exterior skin of Vertical House is of fiber-cement panels, traditionally used in interiors, which he split in two. In an upcoming project, O'Herlihy will wrap a house with an agricultural material used to protect crops. For real estate developer Eve Steele and her husband, Peter Gelles, an international real estate attorney, he will wrap a house in a vinyl mesh generally used for billboards. It will be digitally printed with a work of art commissioned by the owners -- a gesture that will also be stamped with O'Herlihy's typically unconventional imagination.
Steele hired O'Herlihy after seeing Vertical House. She was intrigued by how "the exterior and the interior become one, in a way." Overhead lights in the kitchen are set into carved out openings that mimic the placement of the windows. Cabinetry has the same colors and patterns as the windows and fiber-cement boards -- dark coffee bean, blue, yellow. "He was also conscious of cost without compromising quality," Steele says. "It's entirely original. He really made a lot out of a little. It was such an elegant solution. "
O'Herlihy is also known for his never-say-die attitude toward building on precipitous, even dangerous hillside plots and on hemmed-in slices of earth like his own on Pacific Avenue. (Thus, a vertical house.) "Lorcan is the master of getting it done, getting things accomplished against all odds, all obstacles," says Scarpa.
An obstacle he'd sooner put out of his mind involved the iconic Schindler house in West Hollywood. Developer Richard Loring, a former architect, hired him to design a multi-family apartment building next to Rudolf M. Schindler's landmark residence, "one of the most significant houses in architectural history," as O'Herlihy describes it.
