Blog

The Trilogy, overlooking the lake at Royal La Moraleja golf course near Madrid, is more akin to a series of sculptures than three properties. Architect Fran Silvestre designed each house, with their distinct clean lines and geometric volumes, to “create spaces that awaken the emotions”, he says.

On the market from €10.5mn, the homes are a world away from the identikit Moorish-style golf properties built in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Spain and Portugal’s Algarve — and not just in terms of price tag. Architecture wasn’t the priority back then: the focus for buyers was golf — playing 36 holes a day — while for developers it was to sell as many homes as possible, says Martin Ebert, an international golf course architect whose company, Mackenzie & Ebert, advises eight of the 10 Open Championship venues. “The tendency was to put in too many homes, each of a very similar style. At some developments, every hole was surrounded by houses.” 

But buyers and their expectations have evolved, says Paloma Pérez Bravo, chief executive of residential estate agency Lucas Fox, which is selling the properties that make up The Trilogy. There are more women and families in the mix, and a desire for architect-designed homes that speak to the local culture and lifestyle. “They want a family retreat with access to nature, wellness and culture,” she says. More people also are also wanting to play 12 and nine hole courses, which are faster and more inclusive for families, adds Ebert. 

Among Ebert’s recent projects is the 1,100-acre championship course at Moncayo, in Puerto Rico, where the first phase of golf residences, available from 2027, has been designed by architectural practice Hart Howerton, and will be managed by Auberge Resorts. The homes are built into the tropical landscape and the design, which blends modernism with Taino and Spanish Colonial influences, maximises light and makes the most of the ocean views. Golf is not the only activity on the agenda: residents can trek in the rainforest, hike in the mountains and fly fish. “Golf has become cooler,” he posits. “And so too have golf properties”.

Ebert regards the pandemic as a turning point: a younger demographic started playing — newly appreciating the combination of spending time in a protected landscape playing sport. Home sales near Spanish golf courses increased by 25 per cent between 2020 and 2023, fuelled in part by second-home buyers from the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, according to the Spanish Land Registrars Association. The average golfer’s age dropped from 46 to 41 after the pandemic, according to data from governing body R&A and England Golf, while the tournament organiser PGA’s ‘Golf for All’ report shows that players under 45 now make up the majority of on-course golfers in the UK and Ireland.

“Increasingly, golf courses are celebrated as areas where land has been protected, and where — between the holes — flora and fauna can flourish,” says Ebert. “Buyers like the fact the view is secure. On a golf course you always know what you’re going to be looking at in years to come.”

For a new generation, ecological considerations are a growing priority. Properties such as The Seven, a new development of seven homes by seven leading architects (including Silvestre) at La Reserva in Sotogrande, use local materials, have renewable energy systems and have designs that keep them naturally cool in summer and warm in winter.

The Trilogy takes its design cues from La Moraleja, an upmarket residential enclave a few kilometres from Madrid city centre that’s dotted with pines, cypress and olive trees; the three designs aim to frame the views and mimic the land’s contours. The Andalusian stone floors and locally sourced ash and brass finishes echo the hues of the surrounding forests. Silvestre says he wanted to create a sense of “calmness . . . peacefulness . . . protection and seclusion”. 

Increasingly, golf courses are celebrated as areas where land has been protected, and where — between the holes — flora and fauna can flourish

Privacy is an increasing priority, says Pérez Bravo. “The next generation of golf properties are family retreats; owners are looking to spend more time at the property — often several months of the year — and want it to feel private and personal.” Gated communities with security and concierge facilities are high on the wish list. But top-end security comes at a price: one property in The Seven development in Sotogrande, with its 24-hour security and gated entrance, is on the market for €22.5mn.

At Quinta do Lago, in Portugal, there are similarly high prices — up to €30mn for a new-build villa. But North Grove, the final undeveloped piece of land from the original master plan, has three plots available from €3.5mn without architectural design restrictions, allowing buyers free rein.

Meanwhile, younger buyers are putting down roots in new communities such as Finca Cortesín, in Casares, Andalusia, and those in Murcia, Alicante and Castellon. Often drawn by the local landscape they are looking for architecture that makes the most of it, adds Jules Cowan-Dewar, chief marketing officer of Cabot, which has residential golf resorts in St Lucia, Scotland, Canada and the US. “They won’t settle for somewhere that could be anywhere,” she says. “If they’re in the Caribbean, they want views of the ocean, storage for kite surfing equipment and outdoor living spaces to read and entertain, while in Nova Scotia they’ll want a deck to watch the lobster boats come in.” 

At Cabot Cliffs on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, London-based practice FBM Architecture has designed simple cedar shingle homes in the dunes with metal roofs that are a modern take on local coastal vernacular, with soft grey and blue interiors to reflect the colours of the surroundings. The development was one of 12 to win the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture last year. “Buyers want to feel connected to the place,” says Cowan-Dewar. The houses are all now sold, but ocean-view plots, where owners can build a custom property, are on the market from C$1.3mn (£709,212).

Building a home from scratch is the holy grail for many. After returning each year for a decade to Costa Navarino, the resort destination with four 18-hole championship courses in Greece’s Peloponnese, Theresa Kern and her husband bought a plot and instructed Athens-based architects K-Studio to design something that embodied the feel of the resort, with its rolling hills, olive groves and vineyards overlooking the Ionian Sea. “We loved the region and the people; we wanted somewhere to be with our three children and our friends where everyone could be together but also have their own space,” says Kern. 

The result, Southwand House, is built into the hillside using local quarried stone; views stretch over the pool to the golf course and the sea. Its low-rise design, with indoor-outdoor living spaces and four bedrooms, embraces modern architectural styles: architect Dimitris Karampatakis was determined that it sat comfortably within the landscape but was not lost in it. The inspiration was homes in the local Messinian villages, with airy central courtyards and covered outdoor areas. “It’s built for the family experience,” says Kern. “There’s space for entertaining and a lawn for football or volleyball.”

Karampatakis describes the architectural style as soft modernism; rather than the minimalist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, texture is introduced. Rough concrete and carved stone will age beautifully, he says. “It appears defensive from the outside, but inside, it opens to the view. The classical-style Greek atrium with olive tree reflects Theresa’s poise and the dramatic view channels her husband’s high-energy extrovert nature.” There are limited plots still available at Costa Navarino, starting from €6.8mn for off-plan, six-bedroom villas.

It’s important for modern buyers to be able to add their personal stamp, says Pérez Bravo — which is not in line with the old-school ethos of many golf destinations where properties were supposed to dovetail with the character of the estate. When Wentworth Golf Club in Surrey was constructed in 1922, for example, private residential plots had strict covenants to ensure nothing too radical was built. 

Yet modern interpretations take into consideration their surroundings in different ways. Southwand House, with its nod to ancient vernacular and use of local stone and wood, evokes the character of the landscape as well as of its current occupants. 

As Karampatakis points out, there is never just one story that a house can tell. “Each owner will fill the house with their life and it will keep reinventing itself.”

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram

A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

I’m standing in a gender-neutral bathroom thinking about how I might start writing about this sylvan, curious, almost cultish dance venue in the Berkshires and then I look up. In front of me is a yellowing poster for the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from 1965, with foam-rubber seats for $4 and shows featuring the Jacob’s Pillow Dancers and there, right beside, “Six American Indian Dancers”.

That same evening I join a small crowd listening to drums and singing, a hypnotic chanting, as members of the Mohican community, who were forced out of these lands centuries ago, celebrate the opening of a fire pit designed by Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr (a member of the local Nipmuc people), alongside a new $30mn dance theatre. 

Until 1978, astonishingly, Indigenous rituals were prohibited in the US. So it was a touching, slightly jarring moment; the displaced Mohicans invited back for a little moment of “reconciliation”.

Ted Shawn founded Jacob’s Pillow deep in the Berkshires, the rolling New England landscape that really does look oddly English, in 1933. His “Men Dancers”, an all-male dance troupe, performed in a barn and within a decade the entrepreneurial Shawn had built the first purpose-built theatre for dance in the USA. It’s a brutally simple building, a timber shed designed by local architect Joseph Franz. But it remains perhaps the nation’s most important venue for modern dance.

It is an eccentric place, a site which looks more like a summer camp or a Steiner forest school than a cultural centre. Its buildings are rough and ad hoc, a shaggy collection of timber huts, booths, sheds and barns, although occasionally they reveal themselves to be something more, their huge doors flung open affording glimpses of practice and performance. 

In 2020, one of the theatres on site burnt down and it has now been replaced by the more contemporary, though still quite self-effacing, Doris Duke Theatre, designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo. This new structure is the first on the site not to really resemble a barn. Instead its streamlined, curved corners and a broad arcade make it something different, a more contemporary presence but one still super-keen to blend in.

Mecanoo, founded by Francine Houben, emerged from the moment when contemporary architecture was being kicked in the backside by the Dutch, from Rem Koolhaas to MVRDV, smart, cultured designers who navigated high and low culture, the popular and the intellectual. But Houben is a modest character, endearingly unpretentious. There is nothing flashy here: just a simple box with chamfered corners. There are a couple of things I balked at: the columns, for instance, connect to the ground via galvanised slim steel shoes, so that the building seems somehow deracinated. The curving corners feel a little odd too, more suburban than rural. But these are issues of taste rather than quality. This, after all, is a $30mn building in an age of half-a-billion-dollar blockbusters.

Inside, retractable seating sits beneath a technical grid, its underside clad in timber to enhance the cigar boxiness of it all. It seats between 220 and 400. That it is timber is not just an homage to its neighbours. The wood, according to Jacob’s Pillow archivist Norton Owen, allows the audience to feel the dancers, to sense every jump. Small vibrations are carried through the floors and walls so that it seems to come alive with dance.

Intriguingly this is almost exactly how the Mohicans talked about dance themselves. At the moving land acknowledgment, Shawn Stevens (“Red Eagle”), a member of the Stockbridge Munsee band of Mohicans, explains how “Dance is about energy and returning energy to the earth, so that we all feel it together.” It is as eloquent an encapsulation of an architecture of dance as you can imagine. 

If I mentioned that Jacob’s Pillow has a slight tinge of cultishness, it is not entirely an insult. There is a constant buzz, thanks perhaps to the proximity of the students, teachers, technicians and audiences. This is a place of freedom in a surveilled society. Anyone can wander in and feel part of it, watching the dancers roaming around the structures like lithe beasts. The devotion to the cause here is evangelical. Everyone who works here tells you how much they love it, how wonderful a place it is, how full of reverence they are for its history. I can’t help approaching a few Mohican stragglers after the ceremony is over to wonder if the acknowledgment might not feel a little patronising (no one here is giving any land back), and even then I only get a gush of gratitude.

I do wonder, then, if the new building is a little too slick. The old barns here are still in use and they are wonderful, their beams, their lofty roof spaces, their walls and well-worn floors so redolent and seductive. But then the new theatre is also crammed with tech in a way they never could be.

AI and all that comes with it is the future, I am told here, which sounds odd to me as dance seems so visceral and embodied. Dancer and curator Katherine Helen Fisher has put on a show in the exhibition space that curves around the edge of the new theatre. I find it unsettling, a slew of interactive images that place the viewer at the centre of an immersive digitality. In the midst of this low-tech retreat you find yourself suddenly surveilled again, captured in AI-generated images which are spewing out carbon from some grim data centre. 

Still, this remains an enchanting place, with its haunted barns and shabby shacks and the occasional flash of high-tech present. At the end of my first evening here the site was permeated by the smoky smell of the firepit lit for the first time by StrongBearHeart to honour the land and the peoples who have occupied this place. Those cultures still linger, along with the echoing footsteps of the world’s great dancers.

jacobspillow.org

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning

Sitting in the sunny kitchen of architect Nathaniel Mosley’s north London home, it’s easy to become engrossed in the kitchen table. The plywood piece of furniture is covered in scribbles, encapsulating the hubbub of family life that unfolds around it. “I hate homework” is gouged in biro. A felt-tipped puffer fish bobs along blowing bubbles.

In the neighbourhood of Stoke Newington, the tall Victorian terraced house was built in the late 19th century and immediately split into flats. It was “too grand for the area”, explains Mosley, who bought the section spanning the building’s first, second and third floors with his wife, the writer Emily Rhodes, 10 years ago. Then, the couple had one baby; now there are three children: Vita, 10, Ezra, eight, and Martha, five — plus Alfie the whippet. 

Together they’ve turned a space that was “badly planned, awkward and dingy” into a light and airy family home. Drawing upon the original high ceilings and good bones, generous living spaces have been cleverly spliced alongside cosy cubby holes and sleek inset cabinetry; sweeping curtain partitions add to the adaptability. 

It’s a far cry from the “push out and up”, kitchen and loft-extension renovation that prevails in London terraces; instead the space turns the traditional terrace footprint on its head. Central to the dynamical reconfiguration was the major decision to move the staircase — bringing together two disconnected sets of stairs into one central well.

“I love the flowing elegant stairs of Victorian houses,” says Mosley, who founded the architectural practice Mosley Thorold alongside Henry Thorold in 2017. “I didn’t want to do a pastiche but I wanted to take that feeling and use contemporary materials and fabrication to do something that speaks to tradition.” The result is a floating ribbonlike form, constructed in steel, painted white and clad in ash wood, with a flowing handrail atop string railings.

The layout fanning out from the stairwell is pleasingly unusual. The whole first floor is taken up with a kitchen-living room, but from there one encounters a series of small and surprising compartments. A downstairs corridor, for instance, doubles as a larder with built-in shelving, while you’d be hard-pressed to find the hidden downstairs loo.

Tricky-to-use small spaces have been smartly rethought. On the half-landing, a bijou music room has been created; a curtain allows the space to switch between landing and nook. Its rooftop has become an outdoor terrace, a place for barbecues and summer lunches. In the office, meanwhile, a ladder leads to a further nook above — this one rather more romantic and desk-sized: a bookish haven, eked out of otherwise dead space next to a high-up window. 

It’s here that Rhodes runs the charity Bookbanks — a new initiative devised to donate books via food banks — and plots excursions for Emily’s Walking Book Club, whose monthly meetups combine literary conversation with strolls over Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park. The music room is also Rhodes’ domain, where she plays the cello. The children are following suit, between them learning the guitar, clarinet and piano. 

“The only reason I go in there is for the cookbooks,” laughs Mosley, pointing to a whole bookshelf of them next to the piano — a beautiful thing made from burr elm veneer. He’s happier in the kitchen, where a triple sash window illuminates the butcher’s block beneath. Here, with a view on to the trees in the garden below, and the resident swallows and swifts darting about, Mosley preps the children’s lunch boxes and does the majority of the family cooking. It’s the sort of house where rice, flour and sugar are decanted into labelled Kilner jars; on a countertop, an extra-long fruit and veg rack was specially made in ash wood for the space. 

Focus on materials is a big part of the Mosley Thorold ethos. The majority of its back catalogue is residential and based in London; they’re projects where a facade might be made up of large-format rough limestone blocks, or a spiral staircase clad in yellow felt. Mosley saw his own home as an opportunity to experiment. The kitchen cupboards, for example, are covered in sanded-down lino flooring. In an upstairs bathroom, bespoke cabinets are crafted from oiled chipboard edged in ash — a cost-effective solution that also looks cool — while a Victorian pine cupboard is painted in a Josef Frank-esque floral pattern by Dingley Dell. 

Much of the furniture, though, is of Mosley’s own design; the now graffitied plywood dining table, for instance, was drawn up quickly when they moved in and has since become a prototype for a smarter version made in solid oak for a client. “It has slightly bowing edges; I wanted to make it feel convivial, so everyone faces each other a bit more,” he says. 

In the living room, his triangular-shaped walnut coffee table has an embroidered top that opens to reveal a half-finished jigsaw underneath, conceived for family puzzling sessions without the need to clear away the pieces. Opposite, sleek, floor-to-ceiling aluminium shelves hold a collection of old leather-bound books, passed down to Mosley by his grandfather — the writer and historian Nicholas Mosley, with whom he bonded over a shared love of Renaissance architecture. 

And art, more generally, is a running theme. In the main bedroom there’s a pair of watercolour landscapes by Philip Sutton passed down by Rhodes’ mother. In the kitchen, an Augustus John — inherited from grandparents — hangs above a painting by contemporary artist and friend James Decent, while a pinboard made from felt is covered in etchings by German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz, postcards of various artworks, and some surreal photographs of Rodin’s sculpted hands. 

In the main bedroom, a tapestry dating to the early 18th century, found at auction, fills an entire wall. “You can find some bargain [tapestries]; no one really wants them,” says Mosley. “They change the acoustics and soften a space.” It also adds a decorative and historical element to the otherwise spare and simple room.

Mosley and Rhodes are not overly precious though: a case in point is the children’s bedroom, where they all bunk up together, and posters of Taylor Swift are Blu-Tacked to just about every surface, including the ceiling. 

The three-in-a-room sleeping arrangement, so far, “works really well”, says Mosley. The children also have the run of the room next door, which has become a kids’ den with sofas and toys. It’s a space designed to be “quiet and peaceful”, says Mosley. “You can escape up here when everything else is a bit hectic.” Indeed, the whole house offers an ingenious solution to the push and pull and family life, the need for noise and quiet, areas to be social and others to be secluded. It’s a space that ebbs and flows — curtains opened, curtains closed — and no doubt takes games of hide and seek to new heights. 

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram

On a hot day in late spring, I arrive in Oslo for an exhibition at the Norwegian National Museum. I am poised to unpick the “New Nordic” aesthetic, which has, over the past two decades, grown into a regional brand of sorts — stretching from angular architecture to cool contemporary ceramics and tweezer food. But as I emerge from the city’s central station, I am faced with a celebration of Old Nordic. It is Norway’s Constitution Day, a national holiday, and the streets are bustling with bunads. 

The Norwegian national costume, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, is a romantic spectacle of folk embroidery inspired by rose painting and woodcarving. Waves of people proudly wearing them swell through a cityscape now punctuated by sharp-edged 21st-century buildings, such as in Bjørvika, a residential quarter on the edge of the Oslo fjord that also includes a row of tall, thin offices known as The Barcode. At the heart of Bjørvika is the new Munch Museum, considered by many as the nadir of the city’s contemporary architecture. When it opened in 2021, it was voted “the ugliest building in Norway” in a poll organised by Arkitekturopprøret (Architectural Uprising), a group founded in Sweden in 2014 campaigning for new progressive styles that fit with classical or local tradition.

New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place explores a distinctive movement that, argues co-curator Martin Braathen, has united Nordic architects, artisans, furniture designers and chefs since the turn of the millennium in shaping a locally focused approach to lifestyle design. Its guiding principles are the use of regional materials, a lack of decoration or strong colours, a belief in sustainability codes and a — hotly contested — foundation in authenticity.

But it seems that despite this quarter of a century retrospective celebration, architecture is becoming something of a fly in the ointment. And few places more so than Oslo. In the 15 years I’ve been coming to this city, the skyline has changed beyond recognition. There are two Oslos: the old and the new, the former revered by the public, the latter championed by a particular cohort of architects and property developers. 

In the exhibition, Braathen uses the rise of the Nordic super-chef as his chief protagonist. “A ramson picked in the local forest is as exclusive as imported caviar, and your grandmother’s old recipe is more important than the one in the cookbook,” he says. The local and the traditional are key springboards for innovation. “This attitude has spread into other disciplines as both an ethos and an aesthetic.”

Take Nordic tableware. Like the little rock pools of foraged seaweed they hold, many contemporary ceramics in the New Nordic vein also look to the landscape. Michelin-starred restaurants, such as Maaemo in Oslo, use locally crafted crockery. Sissel Wathne, a Lillehammer-based Danish ceramicist whose pieces can be seen in the National Museum exhibition, believes that the new is rooted in the old. Her work embraces traditional glazes created from foraged reindeer bones. “You can’t use industrial raw materials; I have to go to the mountains and collect them and grind them,” she says.

Critics complain that Nordic architects have moved away from this ethos and are instead working in a self-referential bubble. Old Nordic apartment buildings are much loved for their distinctive high ceilings and ornate detailing. The concern is that these qualities are being lost in the name of sustainability and notions of progress.

Saher Sourouri, an Oslo psychologist who is the spokesperson for Architectural Uprising, argues that: “Most modern architecture [in Norway] has this poverty [of beauty]. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on.” We are having coffee at a café in Frogner, the kind of unchanged historic neighbourhood he favours. If buildings tell a story, he says, then contemporary Nordic houses lack a narrative arc. “The facades are very simple, very boring. They’re flat. There’s no ornamentation. The windows are often asymmetrical. It’s all minimalistic.” And this aesthetic has become ubiquitous, he claims: “A lot of people wonder why everything has to be the same.” 

Developments in the Oslo neighbourhoods of Storo and Løren have been the most heavily criticised. And the campaigners are not just pensioners with a penchant for 18th-century proportions: Architectural Uprising has some 150,000 followers on social media (the number is equivalent to around 20 per cent of Oslo’s population). “On Instagram, about 60 per cent are under the age of 35,” says Sourouri. “The younger generation are much more interested in the classical and traditional styles of architecture than people my age or older,” he asserts. 

While architectural trends in the wider region have broadly shifted, Norway, with its newfound oil wealth (a popular Norwegian football chant goes: “We can buy all of Sweden, if we want to”), has had an accelerated rate of change, argues Sourouri. The “Snøhetta effect” has seen a wide range of practices adopt the monochrome palettes and rocky silhouettes favoured by Snøhetta, the Norwegian architectural practice behind buildings such as the iceberg-like Oslo Opera House and the grass-roofed Bjellandsbu-Åkrafjorden Cabin in the wilderness south of Bergen.

While it is celebrated for its foregrounding of sustainability, rooting to the landscape and social responsibility, there is a pinch point between striving to create a new design and architectural language and connection to national heritage. And while design elements at the Snøhetta tip of the pyramid are often seen as inspiring, the style adopted by bigger housing developments, much like the ideas of haute couture filtering down to the high street, can be less impressive. Sourouri describes the apartment blocks in Bjørvika as “cheap, colourless and bland”.

Most modern architecture in Norway has this poverty of beauty. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on

Oslo’s population has grown 40 per cent since 2000, and the number of dwellings has increased by 63,500 since 2006, according to Statistics Norway. All this, when the city is surrounded by forest on three sides and a fjord on the fourth, all of which are protected. Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museum, one of the first contemporary buildings on the waterfront when it opened in 2012, describes the rate of new housing development as “insane”.

“You have neighbourhoods where you had villas with their large eplehagen, their apple gardens,” she says. “But then came developers, real estate and money. People started to sell the gardens. All of a sudden you sit and you look at all these square buildings. They’re made cheaply, efficiently; they all have their garage in the basement and building on top. They are cubes.” She also says that construction work, concrete and tarmacking has been blamed for poor water drainage. Uniformity and environmental damage would be at odds with the New Nordic ethos. 

For Sourouri and his fellow rebels, the issue is about both taste and the wellbeing of residents. “There is a difference between what architects like and think is the right way to build buildings today and what a large part of the general public think,” he argues. “A discussion I was drawn into was that you cannot talk about ugly and beautiful buildings: it’s simplistic, it’s populist and architecture is far more complex. But almost everyone talks about ugly and beautiful buildings.” On Instagram he can be heard saying: “You have to wear horse blinders when you walk in new parts of town just to protect your sanity.” 

But not all locals agree. “I love the new houses in Bjørvika,” says Norwegian author Martine Jonsrud. “They have a very maritime feel, the walls remind me of fish skin and the shapes are like Tetris, or big puzzles for children. It’s playful and stylish.”

Both the uprising and the city’s Heritage Office have caused architects to adapt their approach. A mixed-used building by Mad Arkitekter in Oslo’s Torshov neighbourhood in the north of the city had to be rethought after its original Lego-like designs were rejected by planning officials in 2014. It took nearly a decade to come to a compromise. The result: an update of a more traditional Scandinavian style. “In recent years, the Arkitekturopprøret [Architectural Uprising] movement has contributed to a broader acceptance of such harmonious and context-sensitive expressions, and to a renewed discussion around beauty in architecture, clearly addressing a sense of longing shared by many,” says Kurt Singstad, a partner at Mad Arkitekter.   

Other Norwegians have found a sweet spot between the old and new. One is Eirik Sevaldsen, proprietor of Panu, a restaurant on St Olavs Plass that plays with unexpected mixes — turbot, lobster, rhubarb — just as the design of his home on the west coast of Norway blends elements from different eras. 

“It was my wife’s old family home,” explains Sevaldsen. “Her grandfather built the place in the early 1930s, he was a carpenter. It’s an old house, a classical house. When we took it over, some people said: just build a new house.” Instead, the couple supported the original structure and built a contemporary oblong extension with a vast glass window overlooking the Atlantic, the two parts unified by the use of stone from Alta in the north of Norway. Two styles from different times complementing one another, like accessorising a bunad with a beanie. 

“New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place”, Norwegian National Museum, Oslo, until September 14; nasjonalmuseet.no/en

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram

It’s often interesting, if not always useful, to compare architects from distant and more recent history. A new exhibition of the work of Richard Rogers at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London affords an opportunity to play that game, noting the occasional similarity or echo, and then the howling chasm, between these two hugely influential architects, born 180 years apart. 

The show concentrates on a handful of buildings to explore the themes that preoccupied Rogers over his long career, from modular construction to sustainability and social cohesion. It kicks off with the Zip-Up House, designed in 1967-69 by Rogers and his wife at the time, Su, and exhibited, surprisingly, at London’s Ideal Home Exhibition in 1969. An extruded yellow box supported on pink props so that it didn’t need foundations and could, in theory, be moved to any site with any topography, it remained visionary, striking and resolutely unbuilt.

He did, however, build a version for his parents in Wimbledon, still standing, still exquisite, if not perhaps the easiest house to actually live in. The original model, standing in the middle of the room, is terrific, a real blast of space-age bravado.

Next up is the Pompidou Centre, Rogers’ undisputed masterpiece (designed with Renzo Piano) and still perhaps the most radical reinvention of what a cultural building could be. Leaving half the Paris site free for a public piazza and creating a flexible interior, it became a massive warehouse for culture capable of reprogramming and reimagining as slippery media shifted. The conceptual model is tiny and gorgeous, in contrast to the beast it begat.

Then, in slightly similar vein, comes London’s Millennium Dome, the vast circular tent designed as the most efficient way to cover the largest area but with a New Labour vacuity at its core, a struggle to fill it with expo-lite exhibits. It is now a hyper-corporate, albeit efficient, gig venue surrounded by fast-food franchises — as perfectly of its era as was the Pompidou.

There is also the Lloyd’s building in its shiny armour of stainless steel vents, ducts, lifts and panels, a powerful reinterpretation of London’s fetish for Victorian iron engineering (like Leadenhall Market next door). Then there is the rest, from an unbuilt housing tower to the compact energy of the drawings gallery at Château La Coste and the details of the vast Barajas Airport in Madrid. 

All of this is framed against a shocking pink, like that of the garish collarless shirts Rogers himself used to sport. In this there is an echo of Soane. Move from the pink room to the (historic) sunny yellow drawing room next door and you get a hint of Soane’s own experiments with colour.

There is also something oddly effective in displaying these representations of buildings on an epic scale in Soane’s intimate domestic rooms. Rogers arguably succeeded where Soane failed, in building grand public spaces and shaping cities. Soane’s only real result in this game was the huge Bank of England (on which he worked between 1788 and 1833), almost all of which is now gone. His dome there may have been an influence on Rogers’ millennium version, as indeed might the smaller one in his breakfast room here in the house. 

Despite his global success Rogers, too, failed to achieve many of his professed ideas. There is a suggestion here of his undoubted efforts to produce an architecture of real and progressive social value. Yet he managed to build virtually no social housing in his lifetime, and his later monuments from Lloyd’s to the “Cheesegrater” at 122 Leadenhall Street were corporate monsters, while his housing, from One Hyde Park to Neo Bankside, was exclusively for London’s ultra-wealthy.

Rogers was a notoriously bad draughtsman, his sketches, like his writing, often barely legible. His medium was social, getting an office to work together. Soane was a little better, but he employed Joseph Gandy to create memorable images of the work, often after they had been completed. Gandy rendered Soane’s work in collages and, in one famous painting of his buildings stacked up in a room, somewhere between models and surreal doll’s houses. Most famously, he depicted Soane’s Bank of England in ruins, as if these works would leave remains like those of Rome, influencing generations to come, building the myth as well as the work.

That Rogers was a sketchy sketcher might have mattered not at all, but there are no credits on these drawings, some of which are spectacular, and that appropriation feels a little unfair. It would have taken nothing away from Rogers to see who, from Eva Jiřičná to Graham Stirk, was responsible. The exhibition was designed and curated by Rogers’ son Ab, who inherited from his father that penchant for vivid colour. No historic parallel there — Soane was desperate for his own son to follow him into architecture, but his lack of interest and then a ruthless attack on his father’s reputation in a magazine (after Soane had refused to pay his debts off) was blamed for driving his mother to an early grave and Soane to disinherit him.

There are parallels in the deceptive blend of clarity and complexity. Both architects’ buildings can appear to be simple, even bombastic statements, yet they also reveal layers of depth and entanglement with history and the physical city that keeps them fascinating.

It is jarring to see the first UK retrospective of one of Britain’s most successful high-tech architects in a house stuffed with fragments of classical architecture and sculpture. But it reminds us that Rogers himself was born in Florence, a product of the same culture of the piazza, the ruin and the continuity of urban history that defined Soane. Perhaps his house too, so emblematic of its age — a 19th-century pair of terraces stripped bare and opened up inside — and just around the corner from Soane’s stables at the Royal Hospital, might one day become a museum too.

To September 21, soane.org

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning

Built into the wall of one of the airy bathrooms at Ashton, an Edwardian country house in Somerset, is a set of spacious mahogany drawers. The house is filled with useful original features like this: generous baths with sturdy taps, large built-in basins in bedrooms, and a huge loft room where the current owners’ five children keep a train set. Amanda Campbell, who has lived there for more than 30 years with her husband, says she was seduced by the house’s generous proportions and light-filled rooms. “There is nothing poky about it,” she says. 

Britain is in the throes of nostalgia for Howards End-style houses such as Ashton and the interior decor of the early 20th century. The era’s art nouveau-style stained glass and muted-tone, geometric tiles are trending on social media, while online searches for its bathrooms and gardens have increased by as much as 100 per cent in the past 12 months. Edwardian country houses, with their beaky gables, square bays and timber detailing “used to sell for up to 10 per cent less than Victorian homes”, says Robin Chatwin, head of Savills’ south-west London residential sales, “but now there’s no difference — many buyers prefer an Edwardian house.” 

Edwardianism speaks to the past and the future, which is why it resonates today, says interior designer and architect Ben Pentreath, who has recently moved to a house with Edwardian interiors on Rousay in the Orkney Islands. “There’s a sense of modernity to good Edwardian design,” he says. “Light-filled spaces, layouts that flow from one room to the next, [rooms] infused with poetry . . . themes that would inspire modernism just a few years later.”

It also offers a sense of optimism and hope, he continues. After the sombre final decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, the accession of King Edward VII and his socialite wife Queen Alexandra brought light and colour to British fashion and interiors — as can be seen in the exhibition The Edwardians: Age of Elegance, at Buckingham Palace (until November). A painting by Danish artist Laurits Regner Tuxen, for example, shows ladies at a Buckingham Palace garden party dressed in pastel shades, a palette mirrored in the hand-painted floral occasional chairs and Danish ceramics on display. “There can be a real prettiness to Edwardian decor — the paint colours, the tiles, the fabrics,” agrees interior designer Kate Guinness, who has recently refurbished an Edwardian house in south-east London. 

The era’s handcrafted furniture was often influenced by the medieval style favoured by Arts and Crafts designers such as William Morris. “It has a sense of peaceful comfort,” Pentreath adds. “The Edwardians had wonderful budgets — fuelled by the late-stage empire and British manufacturing prowess — which means that the quality of the work and materials shines through.”

Houses of the time — Edwardian architectural style extends from 1901 into the early 1920s even though Edward VII died in 1910 — reflect this comfortable aesthetic. With fewer staff than the Victorians, the Edwardians were forward-thinking designers, prioritising kitchens, bathrooms and family living space. The main rooms are most often designed for both formal dinners and children racing around after school. “There’s a wonderful confidence to the houses — they’re solid, adaptable and never overly fussy,” says Oliver Custance Baker, of estate agents Strutt & Parker’s country house department. The Edwardians were also garden-mad, she adds, designing houses with front and back gardens and living spaces that flow outdoors to structured planting and herbaceous borders. 

“Lutyens is the most famous of the great Edwardian architects, but he was but one of a huge generation of talents — Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, Guy Dawber, Ernest Gimson, [C.F.A] Voysey,” Pentreath continues. “They drew deeply from the well of tradition without ever being dull.”  

It combines beautifully with mid-century furniture, abstract art and sculpture in a way that would feel a little jarring or over-obvious in a Georgian interior

At Ashton, built in 1914 for a colonel returning from India, Campbell has created a garden inspired by the horticulturalist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, with a pool and tennis court. Like most Edwardian houses, it isn’t listed, so she was able to open up rooms even further for modern lateral living, creating a vast kitchen with areas for sitting, dining and watching television, all with doors on to the garden. 

Her one regret is that she never went “full William Morris” with the interior; this will be for the next owner, as Campbell and her husband are looking to downsize. Pentreath, however, likes to juxtapose Edwardianism with other period styles. “It combines beautifully with mid-century furniture, abstract art and sculpture in a way that would feel a little jarring or over-obvious in a Georgian interior,” he says. 

Pentreath feels lucky to have Edwardian fireplaces with William De Morgan tiles at his new home. In many houses, Edwardian fixtures — such as original parquet flooring — have been ripped out. It’s now being reinstalled, says interior designer Max Buston, who suggests using narrower planks for a historic feel. 

Guinness avoids the heavier pieces of furniture — the elaborate mahogany sideboards with heavy scrolling and inlaid swags, for example — but she loves bobbin chairs and the striped and floral furnishings (Pentreath suggests a trip to antique dealer Puritan Values in London to find great pieces). She recommends giving chairs “a new lease of life with a new fabric” and points to striped fabrics by Hamilton Weston or Ian Mankin — as well as Adam Bray’s brown paper stripe wallpapers. Buston favours the striped fabric and papers of Pierre Frey and Anna French, and pastel paint shades such as Lucca blue by Edward Bulmer. 

For floral wallpaper and fabrics, both Morris & Co and Sanderson are obvious choices, both being founded at the time; according to Claire Vallis, design director of the Sanderson Design Group, patterns from the early 1900s such as Lerena, a quintessential Edwardian pattern by Voysey, and Rose and Peony, are top sellers.

Even without the croquet parties and cream teas of the “long Edwardian afternoon”, it’s an aesthetic filled with languor and joy, says Campbell. 

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram