The Collingwood House has sold. Initially listed at $30M, it passed ownership for a little over $20M, a full third under its asking price. Are we therefore seeing evidence that the popularity of such broad home design has crested?
Currently owned by producer Jeff Franklin—of ‘Full House’ fame—the striking residence of 1302 Collingwood Place was designed by Richard Landry and his team, and constructed in 2014. A purely modern architectural expression, the home has an imposing façade, relieved only by a playful lighted panel which seeks to balance its austerity. Aside from that novelty, the home is all glass, intersecting plane, and concrete industry.
Starkly beautiful, its arching form poised within 360 degree city and ocean views, the design would seem to dwarf an occupant, if it didn’t dazzle so readily. The main living space is two floors, its ceilings soaring skyward. A staircase spirals to the third floor master suite, with office, sweeping master bath with twin outdoor shower and marble floors, and wraparound terrace with fireplace. Glass walls retract to allow a sense of interior-exterior flow, turning marble-floored living areas into patios.
Throughout the home, there is an attempt at unobstructed vision, offering the illusion that seeing and arriving at distances may be effected in the same instant. This may be the most fascinating element of such a home, and why an ultra-modern design such as this becomes truly postmodern, collapsing all sense of space in its spaciousness, and reducing time to an escapable principle. The comfort offered by such a dwelling must be predicated on an unwillingness, or inability, to perceive the wilderness of form such a design represents.
Landry has been criticized for his lack of a cohesive architectural vision, and his willingness to build homes that may be perceived as painfully grandiose. But his designs are carefully considered and, if self-indulgent, then they are only representative of a particular place and time. The Collingwood House, and other Landry designs, may be a little terrifying in their overall implication, but they are only expressions of regional sensibilities and the zeitgeist of the collective consciousness which contracts them into existence. Whether or not such home design has reached an apex of popularity may only be a question that leads to a more general inquiry into changing 21st century American values.
