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Sandycombe Lodge has been placed on the English Heritage register of endangered historic structures. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

A house designed by the painter JMW Turner as a country home to share with his father will be saved from dereliction and opened permanently to the public through a 1.4m grant to be announced on Wednesday by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

We are just so excited, it is superb news this house is a national treasure, but it is in a sad, sad state, and if we had to get through another bad winter without knowing whether we could go ahead with restoration, it would be truly worrying, said Rosemary Vaux, of the Turner House Trust. The months of torrential rain last winter did terrible damage, and we were really fearful of the consequences if we had another prolonged spell of such bad weather.

The Grade II listed house, Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, west London, is the only known building designed by Turner. It was described by Vaux as a three-dimensional work of art. It was left by the last private owner to a trust, but its increasingly fragile condition meant that it was only open to the public one afternoon a month, and placed on the English Heritage register of endangered historic structures.

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The grant, with extra funding being raised by the trust, means that it will close this year and reopen in 2016 for 46 weeks of the year, with later features removed and the garden and interiors restored to their appearance in Turners day. The house had many features including distinctive tall narrow arches inspired by his friend Sir John Soane, the architect whose own much grander country home, Pitzhanger Manor, was only a few miles away in Ealing. Turner lived in Twickenham for part of the year from 1813 until 1826, producing many dazzling paintings of nearby stretches of the Thames, with his father as housekeeper and gardener. As portrayed in Mike Leighs film Mr Turner, father and son were devoted, though many visitors mistook the modestly dressed little man pottering around the garden with a wheelbarrow seen in one Turner drawing for a groundsman. He entertained friends to lavish picnics in the garden, which had colourful flower beds, a large pond full of fish and water lilies, and a weeping willow planted from a slip he took from the garden of another local celebrity, the poet Alexander Pope.

In 1826 Turner sold the house and moved his father back to his larger town house, studio and gallery in London. Although the house passed through many hands, and the fact that he designed it was forgotten, the connection with the artist was never forgotten locally and it was cherished on his account by a succession of owners. The narrow country lane is now a suburban street, with the house hemmed in by later buildings, but it is still recognisable from 19th century engravings made in Turners day. The interior was barely modernised even after being a second world war factory making goggles for aviators.

Turner kept the adjoining meadow for years, finally selling it for a handsome profit in 1848 to the railway company which was driving a new line through to Windsor.

In 1947 Professor Harold Livermore bought the surviving scrap of garden and the house which was in such poor state that there was talk of demolishing it. He carried out extensive research with his wife Ann on Turners time in Twickenham, campaigned to prevent development which would have damaged its setting, established the trust in 2005, and bequeathed the house on his death in 2010 along with an extensive collection of books and works of art.

Read more from the original source:
Turned out nice: artists home gets 1.4m rescue grant

Portrait photographer Mark Seliger has sold his Richard Neutra-designed house in Los Feliz for $4.52 million -- just above the asking price of $4.5 million.

Considered a prime example of Neutra's Midcentury Modern home designs, the 1949 Alpha Wirin House was restored to maintain its architectural integrity. Wood ceilings and built-in furniture grace the interiors.

The 2,262 square feet of living space contains family and living rooms, a dining area, an office/den, two bedrooms and three bathrooms. Balconies expand the living space outdoors.

Walls of glass allow views of the cityscape and surrounding hillsides.

The nearly three-quarter acre of grounds is planted with palms and succulents. Steps lead to a swimming pool below the two-story house.

Seligers portrait subjects have included President Obama, singer-songwriter Mick Jagger and Nirvanas Kurt Cobain. Seliger has shot covers for publications such as Rolling Stone and GQ.

He paid $1.575 million for the house more than a decade ago and worked with designer Mark Haddawy on the restoration.

Aaron Kirman of John Aaroe Group was the listing agent.

Twitter: @LATHotProperty

More here:
Photographer Mark Seliger sells Richard Neutra-designed home

Now deeply into construction, Tampas next mega-mansion will rise three stories tall and spread out over a 47,000-square-foot space, roughly half the size of some Publix grocery stores, and likely feature rooftop gardens, fountains, and a dozen bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms.

Luckily for guests and visitors, the mansion will have an open-door policy and everything inside will be for sale. The couches in the living room, the robes in the bathroom and the wine glasses in the kitchen. Thats because this mega-mansion will be a Restoration Hardware Gallery adjacent to International Plaza mall, one of just four supersites the San Francisco-based home design retailer will open around the nation this year.

While most other retailers are closing stores or shrinking stores to better compete with online rivals, Restoration Hardware is very much going the other direction, building big. Very big. And the retailer thus joins a small pack of companies bucking current trends and going for mega-stores: Bass Pro Shops and Academy Sports among them.

In a kind of video manifesto, RH patriarch and Chairman Gary Friedman told Wall Street investors this month that his new stores are so different that they simply wont fit into the established financial models, and anyone hoping to understand the companys strategy just simply has to visit one of these new mega-sites in San Francisco, Houston or Atlanta.

We created spaces that blurred the lines between residential and retail, indoors and outdoors, physical and digital, Friedman said. We created spaces where guests who visit our new homes are saying I want to live here. Ive been in retail almost 40 years and Ive never heard anyone say they wanted to live in a retail store, until now.

Rumors about Restoration Hardwares plans in Tampa have circulated for some time, particularly ever since the Champps Americana restaurant closed at International Plaza and remained dormant.

The company officially is mum about its current store at Hyde Park Village, but given how top executives speak of smaller, 7,000-square-foot sites, its likely the new International Plaza gallery will replace the current, smaller Hyde Park Village site.

This month, paperwork started to circulate through City of Tampa offices that named Restoration Hardware as the retailer, and company officials confirmed the location to the Tribune.

Restoration Hardware has long zigged when other retailers have zagged. It was one of the first merchants to fully embrace the idea that customers want to buy into a whole lifestyle, a whole aesthetic, a whole social strata, and not just walk in to buy a couch or doorknob.

Continued here:
Restoration Hardware set to go big in Tampa