00:00There's one difficult German word that applies to this house, and it says everything about
00:11it.
00:12Gesamtkunstwerk.
00:13The total artwork, the total design, that is the theme of this house.
00:19That's what drove Arthur to design everything, soup to nuts, in this house.
00:25The house itself is a kind of museum of how to take a limited number of geometric motifs
00:33and a few materials.
00:35The discipline of limiting your palette is what gives this house its power.
00:45My name's Trevor Bodie.
00:46I'm an architecture critic and curator and a longtime friend and colleague of Arthur
00:51Erickson.
00:53Arthur Erickson is Canada's most famous and influential architect ever, in print.
00:59And I think this house is particularly interesting as an expression of Arthur Erickson's values,
01:05his ideas, even his personal life.
01:08It's called Epic Two House because it's the second house for someone called Epic.
01:13Twin brothers from Slovenia, German-speaking chaps who came to Canada in the 1950s, and
01:22they established an extremely successful business of iron manufacturing operation
01:30called Ebco.
01:32Arthur Erickson did a first house for the older brother, Helmut, in concrete.
01:37When Arthur did Epic One for Helmut and then Epic Two for Hugo, he wasn't doing many houses.
01:44He got very busy doing public buildings, and Arthur relented because these houses, both
01:49of them, are experiments in building materials.
01:53Also, they were very wealthy clients, and they could indulge Arthur's experiments and
01:58that of his collaborating partner, Francisco Krepacz.
02:02And in this house, you have the full-bore collaboration of Arthur Erickson as the architect
02:08designing the main spaces, and Francisco designing nearly all of the steel embellishments, the
02:15chairs, the candlesticks, the details, and so on.
02:19And the amazing thing here is that they were a couple for a long, long time.
02:24Arthur met him when he was 19, and they were together for the whole life.
02:27What Arthur did is what he did elsewhere, is he made the site.
02:31He reconstructed it.
02:33There's not an original piece of slope or anything here.
02:37It was made and shaped and reconfigured to make it the worthy location for this shining
02:43steel house.
02:49We're in the living dining room.
02:56It's a pretty magnificent room.
02:58You can't go wrong with this view down the hill to the Pacific Ocean.
03:03As we come in, you see the chrome-plated columns.
03:07They're in the room.
03:08They're like people.
03:09These columns have a presence, and they give you a kind of perspective view of the house.
03:15We don't have very hot summers.
03:17We have quite mild winters.
03:19So what we're starving for is not heat but light.
03:24So Arthur's philosophy was to increase the amount of windows on all sides.
03:30First of all, you see the rolled steel structure into which is set glass block.
03:37There's another house, and they look down on this.
03:40So Arthur came up with the notion of the glass blocks, which allows the light in but block
03:46direct view.
03:47So it's a very ingenious little detail.
03:54Where do the curves come from?
03:55This is the first question I usually get asked.
03:57Why do the curve?
03:58He wanted to do something different.
04:00He liked the sensuality of the curve, and the notion is like cascades of water coming
04:05down from the mountains.
04:06He liked the organic form.
04:08It was a middle term between steel and forest.
04:12And then it becomes an almost obsessive theme throughout the house.
04:16I'm sitting on a round chair.
04:18Curves everywhere.
04:28Now this is a chrome column, glass-walled steel house.
04:35So the issue here is to make things more warm and livable.
04:38And Erickson's done a few things to make that happen.
04:41First of all, the ceiling is stripping of British Columbia cedar, warmly colored, beautiful
04:48local wood.
04:49Similarly, the floor is a limestone that was imported from Germany that's used here, indeed
04:56is used on the exterior deck.
04:58Warm colored.
04:59It even has little vestiges of trilobites and shells in it.
05:04So it's a very interesting stone.
05:06It's very nice that in the house is artwork by the eldest of the epic boys, the eldest
05:12boy Egon, who was an artist, a painter, and a sculptor.
05:17And all through this house and his brother's house, you have paintings by this very significant
05:21artist who was shown all over Europe.
05:24More custom details by Francisco in the dining room.
05:27This dining room chair is a variation on a kind of Biedermeier concept, a curved back
05:34chair with its strung metal structure.
05:37You can almost play it like a harp with a structural piece in here to keep it straight.
05:43Somewhat bizarrely, we have placemats manufactured in a steel factory, an all steel placemat
05:53with two wing sections for your cutlery.
05:56The plate goes here, lifted up off the table.
06:00It weighs about 10 pounds.
06:02I've never seen an all metal placemat before.
06:05Finally, a little bonbon tray, again, circular with the little details on it.
06:15This house has two wings.
06:17The main wing with the levels of the house stacked on each other.
06:21Then there's a cross axis for the pool and a structure that goes over the pool.
06:26And the two come together like this, and they're open to the south.
06:31That means the main house here behind me is facing southwest, which is exactly what
06:36you want in this climate.
06:37Afternoon light, light that will come to the living room, come into the dining room when
06:42you're eating.
06:43It's the best orientation.
06:45Hugo Eppich and Brigitte's wife love forests, and they love nature, and they wanted water.
06:51Water feature was so important to them.
06:53So that became a structure of the whole layout of the site.
06:58And then they had enough room now to make a pond.
07:00There are three or four different reflecting pools if you want.
07:04So water is at every corner of this house.
07:09Arthur really believed in having water around his buildings because in this gray climate,
07:15light reflects off the water surface and illuminates the building in a dramatic way.
07:28We're now in a realm which is Arthur Erickson's creation together with his landscape architect,
07:34Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.
07:38As Arthur Erickson is to architecture in Canada, Cornelia is to landscape architect.
07:43In fact, she got the equivalent of the Pritzker or the Nobel Prize for landscape architecture
07:49worldwide.
07:50With these things fixed, this was already all in place, she then realizes it in terms
07:55of planting, detailing, making it live.
07:59So all of the flowers and bushes around me here, all specified by her, often very subtle.
08:06She didn't want bright color.
08:08The white blossoms enforced the white steel, etc.
08:12To find a humble landscape architect who doesn't want to blow the architecture out of the water
08:16but to enforce it, you can really see Cornelia's brilliance in the plants she specified and
08:24shrubs and locations of water, etc.
08:27People come here and say, oh, how on earth did he find such a great site?
08:30Well, you don't find a great site like this, you make it.
08:39This is Helmut and Bridget Eppich's own bedroom.
08:43To me, as a critic and a sleeper, it's a bit too big.
08:47I've had apartments the size of this bedroom.
08:50Here it's custom furniture again, designed by Francisco, in a turquoise leather.
08:55And it's a color you don't often see in furniture, but I think it works quite well with the setting
09:01with the glass.
09:03And there's a headboard behind the bed, which is very clever, it's just part-rounded strips
09:09of leather on the wall to give a little bit of texture and a little bit of life in the
09:14room with built-in lights, adjustable.
09:23This is actually my favorite bedroom in the house, and it's actually a kid's bedroom.
09:28It's more intimate, it's smaller in size, and from my view, it's got even better vistas.
09:33On this side, there's a forest primeval, and in fact, this room is cantilevered, it's floating
09:39in the air above the natural landscape.
09:43So as a kid, I would love that, I would dream about that all night.
09:46And here, out into the garden, yet another deck, even at the children's level, there's
09:52a beautiful deck out into the garden, an amazing space.
10:06Arthur called it the plastic use of steel.
10:10Steel is usually the least plastic material going.
10:13Concrete's plastic, it's liquid and it forms and it solidifies.
10:17Steel is pretty different.
10:19But he wanted almost a contradiction of terms.
10:23So the elegance of the arches coming down is also a way to cut back the mass.
10:31Those curves live very well with the forest behind me.
10:35Even though he's doing a non-natural material, he's using steel in a very naturalizing way.
10:42And I think this shows you the brilliance of an architect doing things counterintuitively.
10:52One of the great themes of Arthur Erickson's architecture is the dialogue between form,
10:57between buildings, and landscape.
11:00One of the things that Arthur invented to do this is something he called the flying
11:05beam.
11:06Beams that extend out from a house into space.
11:09They are meant to be devices to look through, to link being on the deck to the forest behind.
11:16The flying beam is a visual connection between inside and outside, between civilization and
11:22nature.
11:23And often people don't understand Erickson's brilliance until they walk it on the site,
11:29and then they get it.
11:30They go, why is this guy better known?
11:34I now see what he's up to.
11:36It's not just the house, it's the house and the garden.
11:39It's the house and the garden and the broader landscape, the hills.
11:42House and the garden and the mountains and the ocean.
11:45You start to make these equations more and more rich.
11:50There's a protege of Arthur, an architect called Nick Milkovich, who is on the site
12:05almost monthly for the last 30 years.
12:08So anytime something needed doing, he was here.
12:11And Nick Milkovich ended up designing a studio pavilion, a new building for Hugo and Bridget
12:18in the garden.
12:23This is the studio, or sometimes called the guest house.
12:26Hugo used to come down the hill and sit by the pond, especially early in the morning
12:31or at sunset, and look back at the house.
12:34And he wanted to come down here in inclement weather to get out of the rain or in cold
12:39days get warm.
12:40So the challenge to Nick was to make a small little pavilion that would not distract from
12:45the main house, but it would be big enough to sleep in or to have a few people over for
12:51drinks or dinner has become a much loved part of the ensemble.
12:56What I really admire about what Nick Milkovich has done here is he did not imitate the details
13:02of the main house.
13:05And you can see Hugo and Bridget can lie there and look back on the house and you can see
13:09the love affair that these clients are having with what Arthur Erikson created for them.
13:15In other words, the point where they will want to have a bedroom that literally looks
13:19back upon the house that they created.
13:33The thing about the epic house is that this was Arthur's great love letter to his partner
13:39in design, Francisco Krepes.
13:43He let Francisco go farther and deeper in this design than anywhere else.
13:49And it was an act of love.
13:51And even though when people first see it, it's cold and glass and steel, but we start
13:56to understand the stories and the thought that went into it, it all of a sudden it kind
14:00of warms up.
14:02The house is a testament to their collaboration.
14:05And when people understand that story, the house becomes something different.
14:08It gets warmer, it gets more complex.
14:11That's the hidden secret of the epic, too.
14:14Hugo and Bridget Epic have had decades of pleasure in this house.
14:19The house tells them things about the forest, tells them things about the track of light.
14:25This house is a sophisticated engine for living.
14:30It's a view machine.
14:32It's an optical device where you live on the inside and look on the outside.
14:36And then when we go out and enjoy the garden, you have the reverse.
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