A Curve Has No General Solution
Everything that keeps this home simple is hidden inside it.
A curved surface can swallow a column only if the surface itself has no flaw. Break it once, and the column shows. So the difficulty in this project was never the form. It was how every section of curve is finished.
The Machine Makes the Shape. The Hand Makes the Surface.
The stone is machine-cut, one section at a time, and joined on site. A machine can make the shape. It cannot make the surface.
A machine-ground face refracts, so reflectance varies across a single slab. On a curve, a single highlight pulls a false edge along the arc, and what you see is the highlight, not the form. So the matte finish had to be done by hand, section by section, grinding until the sheen was gone.
This has nothing to do with how hard the stone is. Matte is a feeling. A machine cannot give it to you; only a person can, slowly.
Two Kinds of Broken Stone, One Principle
The feature wall and the ellipse in the floor are the same grey stone. It is a breccia: broken rock cemented back together. The terrazzo across the rest of the floor is the same thing, only made by different hands: aggregate poured in, then ground flat. One was made by geology, the other poured on site, and set side by side neither has to make way for the other.
The Rounded Corner Is a Cleaning Decision
The bathroom curves take a different route. The rounded corners are 3D-printed directly and used as the substrate, then given a surface coat and smoothed, and only then finished in art plaster. There is not a single 90-degree internal corner in the room. This is not for visual consistency. It is for cleaning. A square internal joint collects scale where no brush reaches; a rounded one has no joint to collect it.
The Panel in the Side of the Beam
A deep beam crosses the living room. The usual treatment is to box it in, drop the ceiling and hang the equipment below. Instead we let the curved surface rake upward from under the beam, and gave the space it freed to the machinery. A shaped panel is set into the side of the beam; normally it sits closed, flush with the ceiling. As the screen drops, the panel lifts at the same time, and the image passes out through that narrow slot. The projector never enters the field of view.
Every Judgement Moved to the Very Front
The ceiling circle was built at the joinery stage; the floor circle at the masonry stage. Months lay between them, and the two crews never met. For the two circles to align above and below, the position had to be drawn right at the start and measured once, with nothing left to on-the-spot judgement on site.
This is not a question of who builds first and who builds second. It is a question of who decides.
"A curve has no general solution. Every arc has to be solved twice: first the shape, then the method."
Bring your floor plan, and we will look at it together.