On the covers of DOM & Interior, Interiors and id+C
Can a house be a single minute?
Where color thinks in fragments and light speaks in angles.
A house is a long time. A garden is a single minute. This is a family house that leads its owners, gently and without argument, into the Moment of Now. Its name belongs to Claude Monet, who was as much a gardener as a painter, and who learned from his own flowers and his own water that nothing is ever painted twice. The light moves. The pond, which is only a mirror, becomes another sky. A garden is the most private of rooms. It asks for nothing but attention. In it there are many shapes and many colors, none of them in a hurry, and a person may simply watch, and rest, and dream, until the thought that circled the mind all day grows tired and settles, and the buzzing falls quiet. So here the forms and the colors keep the eye gently occupied, the way ripples keep a pond awake. The body and the mind are given leave to rest. The soul and the spirit stay awake. This is all a garden has ever done, and it is what this house does. To live here is to look, and to be, for a minute, exactly where you are.
Garden of Impressionist is a study before it is a style: a house organised by color and by the hour of the day, with the walls left almost silent. It asks three questions.
The answers are the five rules at the end of the house.
7:35Le Havre, 13 November 1872.
A grey harbor, a few rowing boats, an orange sun the size of a coin. Claude Monet painted it from a hotel window and called it Impression, Sunrise. For a century nobody could say which morning it was. Then astronomer Donald Olson of Texas State University went looking: old photographs of the hotel, the position of the sun, tide tables, weather records, even the direction of the smoke. His conclusion, adopted by the Musée Marmottan, was that the most probable minute was about 7:35 a.m. on 13 November 1872.1
Two years later the canvas hung in a photographer’s studio on the boulevard des Capucines, and a critic named Louis Leroy mocked its title, impression, as a joke. The painters kept the word.2
A whole movement was named after one minute. This house keeps the habit: seven rooms, seven minutes of one day, each with its own light.
Squint, and the house does what the critic complained about. It dissolves into impressions.
In the 1890s Monet asked permission to divert a branch of the river Epte into a pond beside his house. The neighbors feared the exotic plants would poison the water. He got his permission and painted that pond for the rest of his life. A garden, for him, was a room built to be looked at.4, 5
Cataracts were diagnosed in 1912 and clouded his eyes for a decade, and his late bridges burned orange and red. After an operation in 1923 the world came back too blue.3, 4 Which garden was true? He painted both. Look for them at dusk in the library and at night in the master bedroom.
Waking · Level 1
The house opens through a wooden door into a bright space where green and yellow shapes start on the floor and climb the walls. The kitchen island, stools and open shelves stay light, so the color carries the mood: green for freshness, yellow for sun.
Through Monet’s eyes. The kitchen at Giverny is lined with blue tiles and hung with copper pans. For Monet a working room was also a color. Here it is green and yellow.
Noon · Level 1
A table for conversation beside a see-through fireplace. Yellow, mint and green shapes run across the ceiling and the built-in shelves, with small red accents like the lilies on the table.
Through Monet’s eyes. Monet painted his own dining room yellow, and set a long table in it for a large household. Yellow is the same invitation here.
Afternoon · Level 1
Living room 1 is the garden room: a lime-green sofa, yellow cushions and curtains in turquoise, pale blue and lilac, under green and blue shapes that spread across ceiling and floor. Living room 2 is the cool, quiet one: teal on every surface, a cream sofa, gold details and a few red notes.
Through Monet’s eyes. He painted his water lilies for years, until the pond was only light on a surface. Living room 2 does the same in teal.
Dusk · Level 1
Orange, amber and red shapes wrap the shelves, the ceiling and the floor, with a red sofa set apart for reading. Old objects sit among the books: a typewriter, telephones, a camera.
Through Monet’s eyes. The late garden at Giverny burned orange and red. At dusk, the library is that garden.
Bedtime · Level 2
Pink, magenta and orange triangles cover walls, ceiling and floor. A wall of shelves holds dolls’ houses and toys, and a green chair waits at a desk by the window.
Through Monet’s eyes. The house at Giverny held eight children, two of Monet’s and six of Alice Hoschedé’s. A garden is the place where someone is always running.
Story time · Level 2
Turquoise and lime shapes meet a loft bed above a staircase with storage in every step. A desk by the window and a wall of ropes, rings and bars make the room a place for drawing and for climbing.
Through Monet’s eyes. His sons grew up inside the garden he was painting. This room lets a boy climb into one.
Night · Level 2
Blue and turquoise shapes cover the bedroom walls, with a mustard armchair and an olive bench for contrast. The bathroom turns green, behind a glass wall, with teal armchairs and a mirror that reflects the blue room.
Through Monet’s eyes. The other late garden was blue. At night, this room is that one, and nothing asks anything of you.
“Every night, depending on which color the light touched, that touch carried me into a dream made of its shades. They never repeated.”
Arker and Former, Prologue
What the house found, stated plainly. Each rule has its own address, so it can be cited.
The project was published in three magazines. “Every room in this [house] is given its own shade: from soft blue to bright red,” wrote DOM & Interior.
The garden reached the cover of DOM & Interior in March 2018, of Interiors in September 2018, and of id+C in June 2019, each time through one of its rooms.
See the publications →Garden of Impressionist has been on three magazine covers, but in no book. The questions it asks about color, form and the memory of rooms are the ones our books follow, in words instead of rooms. The one nearest to Impressionism as a feeling rather than as design is Arker and Former, a short tale in which light paints two pieces of furniture anew every day. Selected titles are also available in Bulgarian, German and Italian.
Brani & Desi (Branimira Ivanova and Desislava Ivanova). “Garden of Impressionist.” Interior of a two-level family house, 320 m², Bulgaria. branidesi.com. https://www.branidesi.com/works/interior/garden-of-impressionist.html.
Each hour and each rule has a permanent address: #r-entry, #r-dining, #r-living, #r-library, #r-girl, #r-boy, #r-master, and #rule-1 to #rule-5.
A garden is never finished. There is only this light, on this morning, for as long as you are looking.
More works →“The light spilled over them and painted them anew every day.”
Arker and Former, Epilogue
