Ray Kappe is one of our favourite architects. With his projects he perfectly represented the Modernists philosophy and built some of the most beautiful Californian houses, including his own: the Ray Kappe residence.
Below is a short interview and house tour that Nowness had with Kappe in his house last year, follows the video transcript. Enjoy!
It can be private. It can work for two people. It can work for a family and it can work for large groups and large parties, so it’s probably what I would call my most public private space. I think the most dominant part probably to people who come is probably the space that happens, because again, I take them through a progression of coming in low, coming up, and then kind of exploding. So that’s fairly typical of Frank Lloyd Wright and how he had a sense of the idea that you don’t just walk in and the whole thing is there in one fell swoop immediately.
I just like this area a lot, too. I like the idea that we had a park. We had tennis courts. There were lots of activities for the kids. We could walk to the beach, all those kinds of things. And the lot looked like a nice challenge.
It’s a very measured house in many ways, and yet at the same time it gives a feeling, I think, of openness and freedom.
