Bobby McAlpine

Q&A

Flower: When we offset met, you lot were firmly based in Montgomery, Alabama. You've branched out quite a bit since then.

BOBBY McALPINE: Nosotros have offices in Montgomery, Atlanta, Nashville, and New York, and now I alive in Atlanta. I'g about to begin building a new house for myself here in Ansley Park. [Note: McAlpine House was completed in 2017. Look inside.]

You drew your first house when you were five, despite growing upwards in some pretty uninspiring environment. How did that early exposure influence your development as an architect?

I grew up in a manufacturing plant town in South Alabama, which shaped me in that the houses in that location were built past the manufactory for their workers and were not proprietorial. The lack of consideration in their design drew me into a world of consideration. Sometimes, you are chosen to your life's work because yous didn't see anything you lot recognized.

Where do you kickoff when you're dreaming upward a new house?

I start with the furniture programme first earlier there are walls. As I arrange furniture, it tells me where to put the fireplace so the room falls into shape around it. Compages is born of the landscape, and then the site always has a tremendous impact on me. If I'm designing a mountain house, everything is oriented to the view. For a embankment house, on a precious, tiny slice of expensive basis, a firm might exist a piffling more than ambitious and gymnastic. You might err to a little more glamour. Y'all have to make the nigh of the piece yous get.

Bobby McAlpine interior
McAlpine starts a house design with a piece of furniture plan that tells him where the fireplace will go, such as this soaring stone case for a lake house. Photo courtesy of McAlpine Tankersley Compages

At what point exercise yous start visualizing the landscape?

Gardens should be extensions of the rooms they're outside of. I constitute things that I would bring into the room, and my preferred palette is pretty limited to white, gray, blue, regal, and green. I like to place characters out in the lawn—eccentricities—such as topiaries that await like they wandered out into the m.

The landscape is the correction to the architecture. Sometimes it is parallel to the house; sometimes information technology's a counterpoint. A modern house oft needs a traditional garden to soften it. Often, the garden apologizes for what you've done. If homeowners want a very avant-garde business firm on an otherwise traditional street, they need something to buffer that. Otherwise it's going to look like an angry teenager at a dinner political party. A house is successful when it looks happy in its surroundings.

Bobby McAlpine exterior
"Gardens should be extensions of rooms they're exterior of," says Bobby McAlpine. Here, a Mediterranean-style business firm wraps around a courtyard designed by Nashville landscape architect Ben Page. Photograph courtesy of McAlpine Tankersley Architecture

You've explored a look that could exist described every bit a "fairy-tale fashion," with swooping rooflines, cedar shingles—all very timeless. How do you lot address the gardens of that style?

That style house tends to exist asymmetric, with a differently weighted mass. So a romantic, casual garden suits a fairy-tale business firm.

Over the years y'all've partnered often with Nashville mural builder Ben Page. What is it about his work that suits your arroyo so well?

Ben is an extremely passionate and learned person. He specializes in manor pattern and thinks in a large mural scale. He knows what'due south going to stand the exam of time. When a house changes owners, information technology doesn't take long for neglect to ruin a beautiful garden. Ben thinks in those terms and so that the basic, construction, and order are still intact fifty-fifty after years of disinterest.

Finally, y'all exercise such lovely structures for worship. Can you lot talk u.s. through your thought procedure on those?

Our society tends to put houses of worship on a pedestal. With the chapel I built for Red Blount in Montgomery, I considered how I could add to the context of a spiritual structure. It is a pairing of ii emotions I adore: inertia and ascension. I depressed the chapel into the earth up to the bottom of the windowsills and so y'all descend into the chapel in pursuit of something higher and greater.

Bobby McAlpine Montgomery chapel
McAlpine is drawn toward the modesty of English country churches. He designed this Montgomery chapel with a side aisle entrance that parallels the vaulted sanctuary and "allows you to feel humility and grandeur at the same time," he says. Photograph courtesy of McAlpine Tankersley Architecture

By Lydia Somerville

More from Architect Bobby McAlpine

  • Kirk Reed Forrester reviews Verse of Place: The New Architecture and Interiors of McAlpine
  • Behind the Design: Bobby McAlpine's New Romantic Modern Home

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