Fly me away... artist's impression of the 747 house. Photograph: www.syndesisinc.com
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a house. Santa Monica architect David Hertz had a tricky assignment to design a house for a client on the cliffs of Malibu. The client wanted curvy, graceful forms to blend into the hillside. Hertz started sketching. "The section I drew reminded me of an airplane wing," he says. "And then we thought why not use an airplane wing? If we were to try to fashion a roof like an airplane wing, that would cost a lot of money."
"The concept didn't come from let's build a house from an airplane," he adds.
The client's existing house, set on 55 acres (22 hectares), was built by Hollywood designer Tony Duquette, an eccentric figure who designed homes for J Paul Getty and the Duchess of Windsor as well as many Hollywood stars. Duquette was also a noted set designer both in Hollywood and the theatre.
Hertz went to Camarillo airport, near Los Angeles. "There are literally thousands of airplanes that are mothballed there like an airplane graveyard," he says. "There are planes pretty much as far as the eye can see."
He liked what he saw, and bought a $2m (just over £1m) 747-200 - the 18th ever made - for $30,000. Then he started cutting it up. The two wings will serve as roofs, while the nose of the plane will be set on its end to serve as a viewing platform.
"This is 100% post-consumer," he gushes. "It's pre-fab. It's large-less, meaning we have very few large pieces. Essentially we've used every component. This became a very interesting model of reuse of beautiful shapes and forms."
Up, up and away.
