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The home sprang from the imagination of its owner, plastic surgeon Dr. Jean Cukier, who has long had a fascination with science fiction. He drew the concept on paper and gave it to architect Lynn Swisher Spears to bring to life. The neighbors reportedly weren’t in love with the design at first, nor its tendency to draw curious onlookers from around the world. But Star Wars fans are obsessed, and as it turns out, there are a few vaguely sci-fi features inside the house, too, though most of it just looks like your average Texas mansion.

At the center of the home is an angular atrium fit for a supervillain. There’s a grand staircase near the front door, soaring ceilings, and floors made of concrete and stone that were hand-cut and painted in black and white for a jagged effect. A huge sunken conversation pit is perhaps the home’s most divisive feature, set adjacent to the living room and kitchen and at the base of two floating staircases. It’s lined with rope lights that glow neon blue after dark and has an oddly antisocial sofa at the center, with four seats facing in different directions.

For its massive size, you might be surprised to learn that the Darth Vader house only has 4 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, but each room is generously sized, especially the master suite. Other love-it-or-hate-it features include jagged stone countertops, oversized sculptures, and a totally open master bathroom tucked behind a partial wall.

Texas Monthly’s Paula Mejía got to tour the inside in person, reporting that it felt like “being on the set of a retro space-age B movie, à la Barbarella.” Of the atrium, she says, “This space strikes me as one that’s pitch-perfect for plotting. It’s a lair from which you might wheel and deal, perhaps scheming to take over the world. Cukier didn’t use it as an office at all when he lived here, though. It housed his music studio, which included a Moog synthesizer, organ, and piano.”

Believe it or not, when Dr. Cukier drew out his concept, he wasn’t imagining Darth Vader. His inspiration was aviation. He did, however, ask for it to be “dark and mysterious,” says listing agent Carron. “He wanted the inspiration around the house to be the stealth fighter, the aircraft. He just thinks out of the box, and he didn’t want something that you would see in every home. You get the dark and mysterious on the front side of the house, and then you get the wide-open and oversized second-story windows [on the back]. We were pleasantly surprised, because from the exterior, you would think it would be dark, but it’s the complete opposite.”

“There’s nothing else like it in the area,” the realtors write in the listing. No kidding. And who might actually purchase such an extraordinary (and expensive) home? According to rumors, rapper 50 Cent recently moved to the area, and he’s interested.

The post Houston’s Mysterious “Darth Vader House” Can Be Yours For $4.3 Million first appeared on Dornob.

From the moment you first spot its sleek contemporary facade from the curb, the McGovern Residence in the Queensland, Australia town of Mooloolaba seems like an unlikely place to find such an outdated feature. Pass through the garden gate and into its high-ceilinged concrete interiors, and the idea becomes ever more ludicrous. But believe it or not, this stylish modern space only offers more evidence that the sunken conversation pit is having a bit of a moment right now, broaching the possibility that the trend might even make its way into everyday interiors sometime soon.

Previously, we’ve featured updated versions of the conversation pit in multiple contemporary homes, including a cozy reading nook in a minimalist Czech home and a luxe, well-padded amethyst lounge pit within a glass-walled room in Cupertino, California. Both of these examples saw the pit padded and upholstered to create more space for lying down. At the McGovern Residence, designed by the Australian firm Reitsma, a modern conversation pit echoes the shapes of the 60s and 70s originals with a sunken semi-circular couch, but it somehow feels natural in its very of-the-moment surroundings.

Upholstered in a rich smoke-colored velvet, the sunken feature lures you in with soft surfaces and views of both an adjacent reflecting pool and a theater-style screen. Its round shape also mimics that of an opposite wood-clad volume and the ceiling tray directly above it, bringing some organic curvature into a space that’s otherwise quite hard and linear.

Other intriguing details seen throughout the interiors (all photographed by Kelli Black) include lots of strategically placed skylights, glazing directed only at private outdoor spaces to avoid views of the neighbors, and a stunning stone backsplash in the kitchen.

“A landmark site, a radical client willing to take risks, and a sensational builder: the dream commission,” says Reitsma of the project. “The south-facing riverfront allotment was occupied by a very charming but exhausted 1940’s worker’s cottage. The cottage was casually nestled between two mature trees: one to the street and one to the river. The secluded, sheltered feel needed to somehow remain. Surrounded by high-rise construction [on] either side, this would be the only house left in the street, [so] it had to be excellent, not wasting a single inch of the expensive potential development site.”

They add: “In an unusual move, our brief went against the typical trend. A lowest three-bedroom home with one living room would set the agenda, [and] this would be an exercise in quality over quantity. The modest size would not only allow for generous landscaping, but it would also ensure the new home would be of a manageable scale for the years to come, [and] a special place to enjoy for a lifetime.

“The built home may be modest in size, yet it is rich in thought, detail, and specification. In contrast to the original lightweight worker’s cottage, this new home presents [itself] as a very permanent structure, anchored to the ground with an extensive use of off-form concrete. The new home [also uses] frameless glass and large volumes to capture the [forest] surroundings, maintaining its original connection to both the site and river.”

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A new Craig Steely Architecture-designed home called “Pam and Paul’s House” in Cupertino, California shows just how that can be done. Envisioned as an elevated glass box sitting on trunk-like supports among the treetops, this modern residence includes not one but two sunken spaces built into its ground level.

The first is a small wood-lined office with hidden storage, and the second is a kid-friendly padded pit that’s fully upholstered in 144 square feet of designer Patricia Urquiola’s “Tufty Time” microfiber sofa components. The conversation pit and office are like twin pools of warmth in a space that might otherwise feel a bit cold with all of its concrete surfaces, glass, and zig-zagging strips of LED lighting built into the ceilings.

Instead of carving out a central void for a coffee table, the architects made the conversation pit all one depth, padding the entire area for enhanced lounging. Rather than facing a television (like the furniture in most living rooms does) the pit enjoys views of the surrounding forest on three sides through sliding glass walls.

Every surface in the sunken office, including the tabletop, cabinets, and flooring, is milled from a single slab of Chinese pistachio wood (hopefully the owner’s computer monitor won’t get knocked right in by galloping children or dogs). On the other end of this level, past the gleaming white kitchen with its 22-foot-long counter made of white composite quartz, is a more conventional living area.

Located in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, the home is set into a steep site, and its entrance is on the second level, which itself is accessible by way of a steel bridge. This level also includes a garage that overlooks a meadow-like terrace filled with native grasses, while the bedrooms are tucked in close to the hillside on the ground floor. The dense woods surrounding the home give it both privacy and shade, making all that glass a lot more livable than it would be otherwise.

“The house sits at the boundary between suburb and wilderness and straddles the two like it sits on the site. Just as they did before construction, mule deer rest in the shade of the cantilever which is now a continuation of the oak canopy. Gray squirrels run along the branches and wild turkeys roost in the treetops, merely 10 feet away from the kitchen table. The expanse of glass feels permeable and disappears only to leave nature as it always has been in the grove.”

All photos by Darren Bradley

The post Sunken Spaces: 70s Conversation Pits Enter the 21st Century in this Mountain Home first appeared on Dornob.

The ‘conversation pit’ will likely never be completely divorced from its associations with avocado-green shag carpeting and other unfortunate aesthetic and cultural aspects of the 1970s. These sunken seating areas were declared passé by the ‘80s, and when you peruse images of them from that era, it’s not hard to see why: most of them look like giant fuzzy dust collectors. Building them right into the room made it difficult to update the upholstery, and as living rooms became more television-centric, inward-facing circles and squares of seating no longer seemed relevant. But there’s a case to be made for bringing these interior features back in the spirit of the midcentury modernism that actually birthed them, and this contemporary Czech lounge is a beautiful example.

The first conversation pits debuted back in the 1950s in streamlined minimalist homes by architects like Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard, aiming to maximize space and make living rooms feel more airy and open with fewer obstacles blocking sight lines from one end to the other. They offered plenty of space for residents and their guests without requiring big, tacky couches or large assortments of furniture. The ‘70s oozed a little too much grooviness onto what was previously not a terrible idea, and the world collectively moved on to more modern seating arrangements.

But not all sunken seating has to be social in nature, or located right in the middle of a room. Architectural studio A69 proves as much with this installation in a sleek, minimalist home with views of a surrounding forest. Their version is just about as cozy as it gets, built into a platform that not only breaks up the interior space in a simple yet dynamic way, but also leaves most of the vertical height of the room free for gazing out that giant glass wall. It’s almost like tossing a pile of comfy blankets and pillows onto the floor in a favored spot to spread out and read, except there’s better cushioning, and the result looks clean and polished.

This lounge is more about daydreaming, napping and relaxing with a cup of tea than offering canapés to your spouse’s stiff-shirted boss, and it shows in its amorphous shape and casual upholstery. The shallow depth of the pit encourages laying down more than sitting, and inserting it right between two walls of books makes it the perfect reading nook, if the beautiful views of a river and forested hillside don’t present too much of a distraction. The soft gray and rounded shapes of the pillows mimic the boulders outside.

Nestled into a rectilinear black volume raised above ground level on jagged rocks, this bright curvilinear interior space takes full advantage of the windows gazing out onto the water and provides a nice sense of balance to the home.

“A sliding glass wall provides for connecting the living area with an outdoor terrace on the meadow,” say the architects. “The interior is monochromatic using different shades of white – a neutral frame for colors of the forest at different periods of a day and year. The house is a DIY type. It can be taken into pieces, it may disappear without a trace left.”

The post Lounge Pit: Passé Retro Feature Gets a Cozy Modern Update first appeared on Dornob.