Our latest print magazine has nature at its heart – and is filled with green ideas for sunnier months
For this year’s spring/summer edition, we have honed in on one of the five principles we believe are essential considerations for any living space: nature (the others being space, material, light and decoration – for more on them, check out our co-founder Matt Gibberd’s book, A Modern Way to Live). Nature is, of course, much more than an essential consideration for a home – it is an essential consideration of life. The stories that make up this issue all celebrate ways of living that put nature at the fore and look to the natural world for either inspiration, solace, enjoyment or appreciation – and often all of these.
In Buckinghamshire, our co-founder Albert Hill visited Margaret and Peter Aldington at the home and garden they built for themselves in the early 1960s, Turn End, which has been masterfully captured by photographer Rich Stapleton for our series ‘The Classics’. I was lucky enough to visit Turn End – something you can do too – when Rich was shooting and, despite having to work with what is a notoriously difficult house to capture on camera (“because of the subtleties and complexities involved, pictures can only hint at the experience,” as Jane Brown writes in her book A Garden & Three Houses), Rich’s images manage to vividly convey the merging of indoor and outdoor space there, which Peter refers to as a “continuum”. The story is a lesson for enjoying the pleasures of plants in the warmer months to come.
We have gone around the world for this issue too. At his home in Echo Park, Los Angeles, collector and gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker tells us why he’s happiest in his outdoor bath surrounded by the trees he plants every time he catches a flight. In Jan Juc, near Melbourne, we meet a couple who have built a simple house near the ocean and surrounded it with native planting. A visit to the artists’ residency Pocoapoco in Mexico reveals how the mountainous landscape of Oaxaca inspires the work that is made by the creatives staying there. On the Isle of Skye, meanwhile, we take a trip to a contemporary home that was built with the beautiful but harsh weather that dominates the experience of living on Scotland’s north-west coast in mind.
Of course, to engage with nature in the 21st century is to confront its destruction and misuse too. In the UK, household emissions are greater than those caused by all the cars on the country’s road. The Modern House is committed to addressing this and, while we don’t have all the answers yet, we are embarking on an extensive research project that will result in material to help our community buy and occupy homes in more sustainable ways. An easy win in the meantime is to heed architect and founder of Architecture for London Ben Ridley’s advice about the quick, cheap way you can prevent draughts and heat loss at home – find out what it is in this issue.
Part of the work we’re doing will also inform how we operate as a business. For this magazine we’ve used ECF and FSC paper that can be recycled and have worked with local photographers when shooting internationally to avoid air miles. We hope to build on these endeavours.
As the seasons change, I hope this issue proves a source of inspiration for connecting with nature in the sun. When you get your copy, why not start by turning to our visit to artists’ residency and guest house Casa Balandra on the Balearic island of Mallorca, where a simple lunch eaten in the sun with friends is perhaps the most naturally enjoyable thing in the world?
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