Young architect's Fairy-Tale home inspired by Nature's spirals: awe inside 🐚

I heard about this place about 10 years before I knew where it was in fact I would spend time on the internet trying to find it one day I was reading the local business newspaper and on the front cover of it was this place for sale and went home and said Susan we got to buy this place I've talked to Charles tker the architect he describes this initial approach as being you're walking down a path through the woods a curved path and you come across this fantastic sculpture building you're not sure is it alive is it a creature is it a house what is it and it's intended to be a fantastic imaginary experience come alive he tells me that this idea of walking through the path and coming across a building and asking you know is it alive what is it exactly he tells me comes from the first Snow White movie where there's a scene the Black and White version where there scene where Snow White comes through the woods and there's a castle that talks to they're these seven structures in front of the house which he refers to as the seven Sentinels but they obviously look like something from Disney it's the Seven Dwarfs but he doesn't ever call those because as we all know Disney likes to sue people that infringe on their copyright and trademark so it's the seven Sentinels they go across it's kind of like a drawbridge so it's kind of like a castle the water can flow through there just like it would moat around a castle bridge is there do you have a reference as somebody else who was doing this kind of thing so the the Earth house was a concrete structure built in the 70s ' 80s and '90s a little bit south of here that structure was curval linear architecture but they worked on it for decades they never actually finished it and it got tore down I'm told that they would have these kind of impromptu music sessions Frank Zappa came and visited and that whole Community was really the basis the starting point for a lot of this kind of unusual what I call cinear architecture movement and Charles Harker was a part of that who designed and built this place we call it the bloomhouse the project was funded by a guy named Dalton Bloom his parents had passed away and left him some money so he had a trust fund and he wanted to build something unique that would Outlast him the building process took 11 years for two reasons one it was a difficult building to build and two that trust fund paid out every two years so the first big chunk of money they used to grade the site and do the form workk for a traditional concrete slab foundation and a retaining wall on the front end of the slab to hold back the Earth lots of rebar and steel went into that then they used steel rebar they bent it into the general shape that they wanted the structure to be they ran all the conduits for electrical they ran all the plumbing got all the duct work in place and then they would hold up sheets of polyethylene plastic and they would shoot two-part expanding polyurethane foam then Charles Harker spent he tells me 9 months out here with an 18-inch pruning saw hand carving the foam to exactly the shape that he wanted so after they got the foam cut the way they wanted it they applied chicken wire to it and then about an inch to an inch and a half of this concrete stucco a special mix that they got from a Italian Mason what's remarkable is they had to hand carried down every bag of Portland cement every bag of sand every bag of lime hand mix that stuff with water and then hand apply it so the Earth house they were using shop creep and so they would spray a layer onto that structure and they would Tri it this was substantially more difficult to do but as a result you get a much smoother consistent finish to it you can get a better shape with it all of these intricate shapes could only be done hand tring and even then I I've done some repair work it's incredibly difficult to get these shapes with this level of detail because this is you know solid concrete so if it if it cracks what do you do I mean so uh I have some tricks yeah somebody sat or stood on this thing and cracked it about a year ago I have a special tool where I can dig out the crack use caulk to fill it in and then I sprinkle sand on the caul so it gets this texture and then paint over it so you can see little dents and dings from over the years it's certainly not perfect there have been cracks that develop in the structure that have to be repaired mostly to keep water from getting in that's just natural settling of a house yeah and but it's really remarkable that it hasn't settled more and I think it's cuz that Foundation that they built was thick and full of Steel they were smart cuz they knew they were going to be putting a bunch of load on it even the the can lever in the tower that's a tricky thing to do in any kind of structure Charles told me that during construction they were concerned that when people got out to the end um it would Flex a bit and sure enough once they put the first layer of concrete on it would start to crack because it would Flex so they added another steel member in the kitchen that comes straight up under the chin so the can lever went much further originally but they added that in to kind of stabilize the whole structure okay so as they went they were adjusting yeah so he didn't have blueprints he had some initial drawings but he had a general outline of where he wanted things to be he had drawn that much of it up and he had to do some drawings for the foundation but a lot of the decisions that they made were made in the field as they were doing it so didn't need a structural engineer to okay things there's no permitting going this was in the 1970s this is not a part of any City so we're in Travis County and everybody calls this area Austin but this actually is not a part of the City of Austin and so the only permit he needed to get was for the septic system [Music] what no it's a dog oh it it has an eye there's a tail oh or Dragon Mom it's a dog wait is a oh that's a house I've ever been I don't think you can deliver this far oh my God on this room oh very comfortable there's only one room the other's the couch bed hi Papa hi Papa let's go ta that's the tour how you get upstairs there's more space m called my bed it's not really another bedroom is there it is oh oh there's a bed up here I already called dib sorry you can have it it's overwhelming to come in here because it doesn't feel like any other space yeah you don't expect it either you see the outside you don't know that the inside's get to mirror that and be so I don't know you call it organic curval linear I I say it's discombobulating so many people tell me when they first walk in they're disoriented because our brain is not used to this sort of thing and if it had been all on one level our brain would maybe be able to assimilate a little bit more because it might feel like a tunnel or a cave but this being on all these different levels really makes it usual I've had a lot of people come in and most people have the same reaction you just did which is like it's a little disconcerting but it takes about 20 minutes or so and I I found if you if you sit down and you make contact with it it helps like your your brain can do more with it when it feels the texture and it and it it it can start to process things so this is this is a little space where someone can sit and someone else could sit over there I've seen people sit up on on this structure like it's a like it's a camel you can kind of Park yourself in a lot of places and the curves you know are naturally comfortable even though they're concrete so I mean it really isn't all one level you don't actually know how big the house is when you come in you don't even know where's the living where's the bedroom where you can't find anything yes so it took me a good year to map it to map it in my brain like right now you're standing right behind the bed headboard but you maybe don't know that in a normal house most people can can plot it out pretty quickly but it took me years to really get to where I know where exactly where things were and a lot of it was I was digging into some of the walls and the ceilings I'm like oh look that's right there you were doing some of the remodel yeah when we purchased it uh there were a lot of cracks on the building so water was getting in water pipes had calcified in so there were people living here and they had to carry down a 5 gallon bottle of of water just to flush the toilets Charles obviously put a lot of work and thought into the exterior of this building I mean it just looks phenomenal from the outside but most of his attention was focused here inside he's told me that this these accents that are in place are meant to be kind of like a dog's elbow where the bone is sticking through the Flesh and the fur and it's supposed to REM you or make you think that this is a living creature and you're seeing the bones coming out of the out of the skin even this little indentation all the way around all of the wood pieces is supposed to be evocative of that notion but there's so many little details that he put in place that he didn't have to like this like why would you need but here it it all kind of works to reinforce this notion that you're in something completely unique down here in the living room the fireplace has this spiral uh that goes up well this spiral matches the spiral staircase that goes up to the tower and the idea was he really he was a pioneer of Energy Efficiency so when you have a building that's made out of 10 to 12 Ines of Styrofoam you have great Energy Efficiency so while it has a traditional air conditioning system and heater like most homes he really wanted it to take advantage of Nature and the cooling air so there's three sets of sliding glass doors in the building and down below us is the Ravine where the Dry Creek is and the idea is that cooler air is kind of Nature's air conditioning so if you open up this door and you open up the door in the tower it kind of creates this Venturi effect where it sucks the cool air into the building and brings it up the stairs so you have this natural ventilation that happens by thinking about ventilation he was able to reduce energy costs another interesting thing he did is the air conditioning system comes through in I believe there's a total of four of these sort of port hole looking things and they're all strategically located near the places where there's the most heat loss so this one blows on this glass wall because theoretically um there's going to be a lot of heat gain in the summer and heat loss during the winter so by blowing the conditioned air onto this you minimize the need for conditioned air everywhere else but the building has these um curtains the flow of the space is interesting because he had to hide the curtains he wanted them to be a you know KN he knew that people were going to want to have curtains but how do you hide them well you you put them in this weird structure that serves a purpose but looks like it's part of the organic flow of the building he spent a lot of time thinking about how to hide those air conditioning registers and he didn't just completely bury it and try to make it invisible he really highlighted it it's like a nostril yeah it really you know what I I'd never seen that before but you're right every little detail of the building is just really mesmerizing and even even the floor yeah the oh the floor has a great story so this is a concrete slab and he knew he needed to put something down he wanted to use circles because he thought of it as when you take a plant stalk and slice it you see the capillaries coming up through it and he really wanted to have a nod to that idea of the life nature flowing up and through here so at first he tells me he was going to use discs of cedar tree cedar log and thank God he didn't do that because it's a very unstable wood it would have splintered apart so he told me he handmade every one of these tiles and they are all in fantastic shape I mean there's several thousand of them so the kitchen cabinets start off as kind of your standard Square rectangular plywood cases they placed them at different angles so for the dishwasher there's a there's a plywood cabinet there's a plywood cabinet back here plywood cabinet in here but then he added handcarved Cherry to kind of pull it all together all of the drawer fronts all of the accents started off as big chunks of cherry that were bolted into the structure during the construction process and Charles would come out with a red crayon and a blue crayon and he'd Mark with a red crayon where he wanted them to carve it back and a blue crayon where he wanted it to stay proud and over the course of months artists with Grinders and Sanders would kind of grind back to what he wanted so imagine this was all one big kind of chunk of cherry it was cut out for the shape of what was going to be here but they slowly carved all of this shape over months with all of this in place there are no door knobs or pulls everything has a little lip that you can grab it's all very thick Cherry that was sculpted in place and that took forever I'm sure and again it's supposed to mimic sort of the bones of the creature pushing through the flesh around it and this little indentation is key to that it's really hard to find any handles here I took me a while you have to hunt for it it's kind of one of the fun aspects of it and this I will say I made that we had to replace all the k11 sealing acoustic material because after 40 or 50 years of people cook cooking bacon and probably smoking cigarettes and God knows what else it had turned a nasty gray and so vinning the the cook top was really important so I built I kind of I bought a vent Hood butchered it put it into a wooden case and then I used an angle grinder to grind all this Cherry down and so the fan blows through a charcoal filter to keep it all clean and the built-ins just continue back here yeah and and up above that builtin is storage area it's not the most convenient storage area in the world but you can put things up there at one time you could put suitcases and stuff up there one of the big maintenance challenges we have here is humidity groundwater comes up through the floor sometimes and the building can get very humid so we added a whole house dehumidifier up there earlier when I talked about they added a post to stabilize the can lever that's this post it's a deal column that runs up from the foundation up into the bottom of the neck of the Tower and he decorated it to look kind of like a lily but it's one of those examples of function driving art and form but you wouldn't know no it's not completely without its problems when we moved in they had a much smaller refrigerator in there and I couldn't understand why it was old so we got rid of it when it came time to buy a new refrigerator I bought this one and then realized there's no way to get it in the kitchen it would not fit through either of these openings so I had to notch into this structure and take a big chunk out of it and then me and my son's manhandled that refrigerator through this space and got it and then put it back together and so that refrigerator is never going anywhere it's here forever I we tried to get it around here I didn't want to screw up the shelves which it's not just a setup of shelves it has this additional artistic form that again you don't need that and even the sculpting up underneath it to kind of make it look thinner than it is and then the main post that goes up to the ceiling okay it's supporting it but then it keeps going and looks like a rib Charles told me someone asked him soon after it was finished you know why don't you put up more art on the walls and he's like it is Art they detract from you're gilding the Lily if try to put something in here this is the original Cherry table that they built it's designed to kind of push back into that space the table can move the the those benches are bolted in but this is a great place to hang out I sit like uh right here because this shape is is perfectly fits my 55-year-old back it's perfect this little cave runs up under the foyer area uh it goes much further than you think and the Acoustics are really cool it does feel like a cave some kids have slept back in there and guess what you have to come in here no you have to it keeps goinging right pretty deep wait you can can I slip in here I can fully extend my body it's just a nice little cocoon it was for storage because Dalton was rather messy and Charles noticed this and so a lot of the stuff that he designed the closets he designed it so that everything would be stored back around a curve and you wouldn't see it so he was helping Dalton to hide his clutters he actually another Nook up there oh but that one you have to climb on to face you're right wow there's so many strange it's it's a compressed space it's supposed to be sort of a seashell sort of a conch shell thing but it's got lots of weird openings and gaps in it where the light comes through here's another one of the air conditioning vent outlets and it blows on this area again to try to wash this window with heat or cool depending on the season because this is where you're going to get the most energy losses out these glass doors well so if the curtains are up you're not really able to blow air onto the glass so that's actually a hole that comes up here and out so air is pushed through and ends up coming behind the curtains to cool or heat the space between the curtain and the glass so right up through there so that's functional yeah I mean that's too and design wise but it feels like part of the shell you don't know that there's a who would think of this so and when you're laying down with your head on the pillows you're looking up inside the Conch Shell and so the Acoustics there are really cool too but it was built originally and designed for a circular bed they don't make a lot of those anymore they're kind of hard to find so we went with a traditional queen-size bed but a circular bed just fits in this place perfectly and Tucks right up against the wall it's interesting because now I'm I'm looking at it and I had even thought until now that there's no wall but you don't realize that yeah the the only privacy break in the whole building is the bathroom door the whole Space flows together but how the structure gives you that feeling that you have right yeah like so nobody's going to be crawling up over and peeking down at you on on that they might come down the stairs but it's it's still enormously private and you feel integrated to your own little space you don't feel like you're in the whole house you know it kind of Fades away a lot of it is cuz when you're in bed even the stairs are hidden from your view here so you really feel like you're in your own chamber but like I said Charles designed the closets this one and especially that one so you had to walk into it then people wouldn't necessarily be able to see all the crap you have shoved back there this one you know the curtain track comes all the way over here so you can close it off so um I I love this little dresser area here there's mirrors on all three sides so you can stick your head in and see infinite versions of yourself so this is the only door in the space only interior door to the bathroom everything else flows together so uh this was a big pain in the butt during the renovation it's it's very hard to retrofit a new sliding door in the space but the bathroom as amazing as you would think and this is another one of those places where he used opposing mirrors to kind of play tricks this mirror reminds me of a butterfly wing for sure it feels there almost feels like there's motion happening yep yep but all these little shelves are for different dads this countertop was rotted out and we had to redo all of this space down underneath it but more of the sort of the yeah just hugs the wall yeah a lot of people really dig the the bathtub shower area we added these things for safety because again if you start to slip and fall you can't really grab on to anything so these are nice and sturdy but the plumbing was very messed up here the hot water heater used to be under here it was a small hot water heater and it was just ereck so we had to dig around the outside of the building and bring bring new water lines in this one comes up and over and back in here to feed this sink and to feed the toilet that was a ton of work cutting through this concrete cutting through the foam and making a new channel to run the the piping was no easy feat the shower curtain track becomes the the window curtain track oh wow so you could start taking them around yeah take it all the way around little Shelfs back in here we did add an exhaust fan because it would get pretty humid in here plants probably love it they yeah oh I I I I have to trim them back up about every six months they come all the way down here on the floor and the bathroom too the toilet is like I love that there's a um this sort of built-in wood there oh this is one of my favorite things Charles was a renaissance man he wanted to give the ladies a great place where they could do their makeup so who wouldn't want to sit on the toilet and and work on their make makeup down here like that wasn't isn't that great I mean interesting yeah what it was the intention was good but maybe the execution will all that great yeah so this is our air conditioning system well yes and this door is another great example of the carving yeah looks like there's another shower so the outdoor shower it's just the best we're here in a well-developed part of Austin so there's big houses up there and across up there but uh especially in the summer when the foliage is green they can't see you and you can't see them and they certainly can't see you at night if you're in the shower I mean even during the day they they can't see you taking a shower so it's incredibly private it's great to just at the end of the day have a quick shower he put a lot of thought into how water would flow on the building so if you look up there at the very top it's pitched to flow through that little Notch and it comes down the side of the tower you can see there's also sort of a gutter looking app pertinence where water flows off of the deck of the tower it flows onto the main body of the structure and then goes in different directions some of it comes out this little Notch and falls down here there was originally a cedar tree in that circular well space a lot of the water comes over here and into a Scupper that flows through a pipe and down I call it The Flume down this little channel into that space and I asked Charles about it shortly after I bought the house he said well the water you know this is a great example of man in nature symbiosis uh the tree Shades the building and the building provides water to the tree and I said well bad news the tree's gone um it had died years ago but it still makes a cool little space and there's a French drain under there um that drains it out down the hillside was he inspired by Nature absolutely so he he spent a lot of time and wrote quite a lot about the symbiosis of man and nature nature in architecture how important it is to have the structure be integrated to the land rather than forcing a giant rectangle onto a piece of land here are his notebooks with his drawings of ideas and Inspirations it's just a lot of just amazing little sketches and Designs some of which you can see hints of it in the final product it say water hitting water hitting water doesn't it look like the bed he picked a bunch of books he could get from gudi and then he actually has a quote here from gud the TR is born of Destructor itself obviously gudy was a huge influence on his vision for this property but also he thought a lot about how man and nature are supposed to live together in symbiosis and this was really a great property for it because the slope and the different levels of the Limestone ledge really Lin to having to solve some of those problems creatively so before we bought it the people that lived here had two kids one was a girl and she would write back poetry on the walls up here oh wait there's more didn't know there were three thought there were just two all right oh the steps too we haven't talked about look at I mean just how they're shaped yeah they handbuilt this spiral staircase on site there is a 6-in steel oil drilling pipe at the center of it so Charles had Charles Harker had connections into the oil and gas industry in fact the building took 11 years to build in part because the trust fund paid out every two years and when there was a law in the money they'd have to stop construction particularly during the oil crisis of the 70s the trust fund which was heavily invested in oil and gas didn't pay out as much so Charles had to go work in the oil fields at the Gulf of Mexico but here in the center of this is this oil pipe a 6-in steel oil pipe and then they built the the paddles for the staircase off it then built the structure sort of the cage around it which sort of informed how it looks from the outside the bulges and things that you see on the outside are really connected to how much Headroom they wanted to have as they're coming up and down the stairs but even like the rips here he didn't have to add these but they just especially looking down just this amazing abstract flow of these shapes very cool beautiful so it's just such a cool little place to come up and hang out read a book people have had their kids live up here and it you know it's if you're under 6 ft it's pretty comfortable and all of this seating sleeping area it's kind of really cool so there's storage underneath here but why this you know I mean this is like a little place I guess to put your drink or whatever but like just that he thought this through but he thought it but he knew there'd be a mattress on top yeah I guess yeah and a cushion or something um and it's it's a super comfortable space if you're tall not so much but all of these sort of rib looking things most of them are related to the steel structures that are come back and tie into this oil pipe but you know he dresses them up and there's a chamber here this light bulb over here can be seen because there's another air chamber there is this blowing that's that's the airflow and it's coming to this window this is the eye of the dog was my kid thought right right exactly and you can see the path up the hill that we started with okay yeah you want to go out yeah let's go all right kind of have to squeeze through there yeah so he designed this as another one of these intimate places for people to hang out someone would sit there behind you and someone would sit over here and put up their feet and plop their arm and probably have a beer and hang out and talk to the other person over there it's the Acoustics right right it's bouncing off of here and here and off that it's really it's very trippy everywhere right away I saw there yeah sound Engineers love this place because it's got so many weird angles that that um bounce the sound around in unexpected ways yeah but um but from here you can survey the land and see all the Hillside and right in in a lot of architecture today everybody wants a big space big dining room big living room big kitchen and living room open floor plan type thing and uh Charles was really about intimate spaces not for 50 people but for two or three people he wrote a lot about how he felt the Housing Industry was really pushing this unhealthy rectangles like let's put boxes you know this was the ranch style houses were taking off particularly in this part of the country and they he just found those so boring he wasn't necessarily advocating that everybody build something like this but he really thought a lot and spoke a lot about how architecture was kind of going in the wrong direction especially for homes and that our mental health is tied to where we live and that resonates today for a lot of people and so if you're stuck in a giant apartment building with a th units and you're just unit number 389 and yours is exactly like unit number 388 and 390 that opportunity for individualism and connect to where you're spending most of your time where you're sleeping and that's lost I mean I get that not everybody can live in a crazy shaped house like this but I hope that more people people invest the time and the energy to make their own spaces unique and interesting and and to kind of nourish them and feed them for the emotional aspects of life that aren't getting fed pretty much anywhere else all right here what's it look like from here looks like some sort of animal sure I think it looks like a rabbit and it's got kind of one ear stick sticking up maybe the other is flopping down on the other side but like every different direction you look at it it looks like something different so it kind of looks like a dog when you're coming down the hill right from the other side it looks a little more like a dragon or a pelican so that's what's so cool about this place it looks different from every angle for every person yeah looks like a baby deer ah yeah what was it like was it supposed to be anything the architect the dude that designed it if you ask him what's it supposed to be he's like what do you think it's supposed to be like he won't tell you he lets everybody figure it out for themselves Isn't that cool cuz so much art is people telling you what you're looking at and telling you how it should make you feel but this place it's all yours you get to decide on your own yeah that is kind of cool kind of cool I like this place me too

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 356,850

Keywords: organic home, organic architecture, bloomhouse, austin, earth house, natural ventilation, curvilinear architecture, unique home, dave claunch, craftsmanship, crafted home, venturi effect, charles harker, sculpted architecture, organic houses, antoni gaudí, bioclimatic homes, biomimetic home, gaudi-esque architecture, frank zappa, psychedelic architecture, right-angle-free home, no right angles, carved out house, shell-like house, fantasia, alice in wonderland home

Id: MmE6NR4VJV0

Length: 36min 9sec (2169 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2023