Inside a Legendary Modernist Home Designed to Flow Like a Waterfall

[tranquil music] [insects chirping]

There's one difficult German word that applies

to this house and it says everything about it.

Gesamtkunstwerk.

The total artwork, the total design,

that is the theme of this house.

That's what drove Arthur to design everything,

soup to nuts in this house.

The house itself is a kind of museum

of how to take a limited number of geometric motifs

and a few materials.

The discipline of limiting your palette

is what gives this house its power.

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My name's Trevor Boddy.

I'm an architecture critic and curator,

and a longtime friend and colleague of Arthur Erickson.

Arthur Erickson is Canada's most famous

and influential architect ever in print.

And I think this house is particularly interesting

as an expression of Arthur Erickson's values, his ideas,

even his personal life.

It's called Eppich II House

'cause it's the second house

for someone called Eppich,

Twin brothers from Slovenia,

German-speaking chaps who came to Canada in the 1950s

and they established an extremely successful business

of iron manufacturing operation called Ebco.

Arthur Erickson did a first house for the older brother,

Helmut, in concrete.

When Arthur did Eppich I for Helmut

and then Eppich II for Hugo,

he wasn't doing many houses.

He got very busy doing public buildings, and Arthur relented

because these houses, both of them,

are experiments in building materials.

Also, they were very wealthy clients,

and they could indulge Arthur's experiments

and that of his collaborating partner, Francisco Kripacz.

And in this house, you have the full-bore collaboration

of Arthur Erickson

as the architect designing the main spaces,

and Francisco designing nearly all

of these steel embellishments, the chairs, the candlesticks,

the details and so on.

And the amazing thing here is that they were a couple

for a long, long time.

Arthur met him when he was 19,

and they were together for their whole life.

What Arthur did is what he did elsewhere

is he made the site, he reconstructed it.

There's not an original piece of slope or anything here.

It was made and shaped

and reconfigured to make it the worthy location

for this shining steel house.

[lively music]

We're in the living/dining room.

It's a pretty magnificent room.

You can't go wrong with this view down the hill

to the Pacific Ocean.

As we come in, you see the chrome-plated columns.

They're in the room, they're like people.

These columns have a presence

and they give you a kind of perspective view of the house.

We don't have very hot summers.

We have quite mild winters, so what we're starving for

is not heat but light.

So Arthur's philosophy was to increase the amount

of windows on all sides.

First of all, you see the roll it steel structure

into which is set glass block.

There's another house and they look down on this.

So Arthur came up the notion of the glass blocks,

which allows the light in, but block direct view.

So it's a very ingenious little detail.

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Where did the curves come from?

This is the first question I usually get asked.

Why do the curve?

He wanted to do something different.

He liked the sensuality of the curve

and the notion is like cascades

of water coming down from the mountains.

He liked the organic form.

It was a middle term between steel and forest,

and then it becomes an almost obsessive theme

throughout the house.

I'm sitting on a round chair, curves everywhere.

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Now, this is a chrome column,

glass-walled steel house.

So the issue here is to make things more warm and livable.

And Erickson's done a few things to make that happen.

First of all, the ceiling is stripping

of British Columbia cedar,

warmly colored, beautiful local wood.

Similarly, the floor is a limestone

that was imported from Germany that's used here.

Indeed, it's used on the exterior deck, warm colored.

It even has little vestiges of trilobites and shells in it.

So it's a very interesting stone.

And it's very nice that in the house is artwork

by the eldest of the Eppich boys, the eldest boy, Egon,

who was an artist, a painter and a sculptor,

and all through this house,

and his brother's house who have paintings

by this very significant artist

who was shown all over Europe.

More custom details by Francisco in the dining room.

This dining room chair is a variation on a kind

of Biedermeier concept, a curved back chair

with its strung metal structure.

You can almost play it like a harp

with a structural piece in here to keep it straight.

Somewhat bizarrely, we have place mats manufactured

in a steel factory, an all-steel place mat

with two wing sections for your cutlery.

The plate goes here, lifted up off the table.

It weighs about 10 pounds.

I've never seen an all-metal place mat before.

Finally, a little bonbon tray, again circular

with the little details on it.

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This house has two wings, the main wing with the levels

of the house stacked on each other.

Then there's a cross axis for the pool,

and a structure that goes over the pool.

And the two come together like this,

and they're open to the south.

That means the main house here behind me

is facing southwest, which is exactly

what you want in this climate.

Afternoon light, light that will come into the living room,

come into the dining room when you're eating.

It's the best orientation.

Hugo Eppich, and Brigitte, his wife, loved forests,

and they love nature and they wanted water.

Water feature was so important to them.

So that became a structure of the whole layout of the site.

[water babbling]

And then they had enough room now to make a pond.

And there's three or four different reflecting pools,

if you want.

So water is at every corner of this house.

Arthur really believed in having water around his buildings

because in this gray climate,

light reflects off the water's surface

and illuminates the building in a dramatic way.

[tranquil music ending]

[pensive music]

We're now in a round,

which is Arthur Erickson's creation,

together with his landscape architect,

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

As Arthur Erickson is to architecture in Canada,

Cornelia is to landscape architect.

In fact, she got the equivalent of the Pritzker,

or the Nobel Prize for landscape architecture worldwide.

With these things fixed, this was already all in place,

she then realizes it in terms of planting,

detailing, making it live.

So all of the flowers and bushes around me here,

all specified by her, often very subtle.

She didn't want bright color.

The white blossoms enforced the white steel, et cetera.

To find a humble landscape architect

who doesn't wanna blow the architecture out

of the water, but to enforce it.

You can really see Cornelia's brilliance

in the plants she specified, and shrubs,

and locations of water, et cetera.

People come here and say, Oh,

how on earth did he find such a great site?

Well, you don't find a great site like this; you make it.

[tranquil music ending]

[calming music]

This is a Helmut and Brigitte Eppich's own bedroom.

To me as a critic and a sleeper, it's a bit too big.

I've had apartments the size of this bedroom.

Here it's custom furniture again,

designed by Francisco in a turquoise leather.

And it's a color you don't often see in furniture,

but I think it works quite well

with the setting with the glass.

And there's a headboard behind the bed,

which is very clever.

It's just part rounded strips of leather on the wall

to give a little bit of texture

and a little bit of life in the room

with built-in lights adjustable.

[calming music continues]

This is actually my favorite bedroom in the house

and it's actually a kid's bedroom.

It's more intimate, smaller in size,

and for my view, it's got even better vistas.

On this side, there's a forest primeval

and in fact, this room is cantilever.

It's floating in the air above the natural landscape.

So as a kid, I would love that.

I would dream about that all night.

And here out into the garden, yet another deck.

Even at the children's level,

there's a beautiful deck out into the garden.

An amazing space.

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Arthur called it the plastic use of steel.

Steel is usually the least plastic material going.

Concrete's plastic, it's liquid and it forms

and it solidifies.

Steel is pretty different.

But he wanted almost a contradiction of terms.

So the elegance of the arches coming down is also a way

to cut back the mass.

Those curves live very well with the forest behind me.

Even though he's doing a non-natural material,

he's using steel in a very naturalizing way.

And I think this shows you a brilliant

of an architect doing things counterintuitively.

[water babbling] [birds tweeting]

[tranquil music continues]

One of the great themes of Arthur Erickson's architecture

is the dialogue between built form,

between buildings and landscape.

One of the things that Arthur invented to do this

is something he called the flying beam,

beams that extend out from a house into space.

They are meant to be devices to look through,

to link being on the deck to the force behind.

The flying beam is a visual connection between inside

and outside, between civilization and nature.

And often people don't understand Erickson's brilliance

till they walk it on the site.

Then they get it.

They go, Why is this guy not better known?

I now see what he's up to.

It's not just the house, it's the house and the garden.

It's the house in the garden

and the broader landscape, the hills,

house and the garden,

and the mountains and the ocean.

You start to make these equations more and more rich.

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There's a protege of Arthur,

an architect called Nick Milkovich,

who is on the site almost monthly for the last 30 years.

So any time something needed doing, he was here.

And Nick Milkovich ended up designing a studio pavilion,

a new building for Hugo and Brigitte in the garden.

[lively music]

This is the studio or sometimes called the guest house.

Hugo used to come down the hill

and sit by the pond, especially early in the morning

or at sunset and look back at the house.

And he wanted to come down here in inclement weather

to get out of the rain or cold days get warm.

So the challenge to Nick was to make a small little pavilion

that would not distract from the main house,

but it would be big enough to sleep in

or to have a few people over for drinks or dinner.

Has become a much loved part of the ensemble.

What I really admire about what Nick Milkovich has done here

is he did not imitate the details of the main house.

And you can see Hugo and Brigitte can lie there

and look back on the house

and you can see the love affair

that these clients are having

with what Arthur Erickson created for them.

In other, it's the point where they want to have a bedroom

that literally looks back upon the house that they created.

[water babbling] [tranquil music]

The thing about the Eppich House

is that this was Arthur's great love letter

to his partner in design, Francisco Kripacz.

He let Francisco go farther and deeper

in this design than anywhere else.

And it was an act of love.

And even though when people first see it,

it's cold and glass and steel,

but when you start to understand the stories

and the thought that went into it,

it all of a sudden, it kind of warms up.

The house is a testament to their collaboration.

And when people understand that story,

the house becomes something different.

It gets warmer, it gets more complex.

That's the hidden secret of the Eppich II.

Hugo and Brigitte Eppich have had decades

of pleasure in this house.

The house tells them things about the forest,

tells them things about the track of light.

This house is a sophisticated engine for living.

It's a view machine, it's an optical device

where you live on the inside and look on the outside.

And then when we go out and enjoy the garden,

you have the reverse.

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