On an unmarked road in Sullivan County just over two hours from Manhattan, you might start to wish you’d downloaded directions to your phone. But just as phone service cuts out, a clearing opens up to reveal the fluted edge of a long, narrow pond. Perched at its furthest tip is the Vipp Pavilion: a concrete idyll hovering above the water. Surrounded by dense forest and an untamed meadow, the house possesses an eerie gravitas—a curious object left behind by some otherworldly civilization.
The Pavilion’s tiny footprint and the wild landscape that surrounds it privilege liminal spaces. Outside, a choose-your-own-adventure-style journey from carpark to house leads to an echo-y courtyard entrance nearly as large as the dwelling itself. Inside, an unbounded shower consumes a temple-like bathroom larger than either bedroom. “It’s a sculpture you can live inside,” says Sofie Christensen Egelund, “Which freed us from some conventional thinking.”
Egelund, third-generation owner of the Danish design brand Vipp, began developing her vision for the Pavilion over 10 years ago. The project—for which she tapped architect, critic, and founding partner of Johnston Marklee Sharon Johnston as her collaborator—is part of a larger inquiry by the company into experimental ways of living. Together with a coterie of guesthouses perched on craggy Norwegian fjords, Latvian river banks, and Baja beaches, Vipp Pavilion poses a set of questions to its guests: what does it actually mean to escape from daily life? What do we actually need to be comfortable? To connect to the landscape? The art is in identifying the right collaborators—Sofie and her brother Kasper have partnered with architect heavyweights including SNØHETTA and Pablo Pérez Palacios to design spaces that offer answers to these questions.
For Christensen Egelund, the Vipp Pavilion might be the most ‘complete’ of these inquiries. She and Johnston were mutual admirers before the Danish interior designer approached the lauded architect with her “livable sculpture” proposal. (The idea couldn’t have been a better fit, as both parties possessed a deep reverence for art: Vipp’s iconic original waste bin design is in MoMA’s permanent collection, while Johnston’s firm has been tapped to reimagine institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the MCA Chicago, and countless more.) The decade-long build involved a healthy amount of push and pull, a dynamic that culminated in a space that perplexes and preoccupies. “It resets your expectations,” says Johnston. “The compartmentalization of our lives doesn’t exist there; the house breaks down those boundaries.” This spring, the pair and their teams put the finishing touches on the Vipp Pavilion. To mark the occasion, Christensen Egelund and Johnston got together for a walk down memory lane.
Sharon Johnston: Sofie, this is our love story.
Sofie Christensen Egelund: It is. 12 years ago, when we moved to New York [from Denmark]. Frank [Christensen Egelund, Sofie’s husband] and I researched what beautiful architecture was out here—Sharon and Mark were at the top of the list. On our first visit to LA, we were starting to think about this project and were out visiting architect offices. We knocked on their door, the four of us sat around the table, and that was the start.
Johnston: You guys came to this with so much passion. The best projects happen when we have a strong synergy with the clients—or in this case our collaborators. That really stood out to us. In all the complexities of these projects, the chemistry between us is what gets us through. That was palpable with you.
Christensen Egelund: The most exciting part was that there were no expectations for this Upstate project. We knew it needed a roof because people would sleep there, but the purpose and the direction weren’t completely set. It’s not really a home, so we didn’t need to address those practicalities. I describe it as a sculpture you can live inside, which freed us from some conventional thinking. You’re not meant to stay there for a long period of time—it’s a more abstract type of house. You must have thought we were crazy, but you were like, “Yeah, let’s play.”
Johnston: Mark and I were there recently, after the house was finished. Experiencing a place stripped of all the typical complexities of a day-to-day domestic space was so relaxing. All that extra stuff isn’t there. It suggests a different way of living, too. We can live with less if we design what we have really well.
Christensen Egelund: We set a few creative rules early on that were very helpful. One was that every time we came to a crossroads between a more residential or more artistic option, we reached for the abstract. We collaborate with architects on all our projects; we know that if you want to work with someone really exceptional, you need to bring ideas that feel exceptional, too. That’s how we came to this idea of creating a house that felt like a sculpture sitting in a meadow. The land was quite raw; you don’t put a villa in the middle of the raw, you put a work of art.
One detail that shows that idea of unconventional but complete design is the floor-length curtain that stretches all the way around the main room—you can pull it across the windows and around the walls. It creates the feeling that you’re in a cocoon or acting in a scene. That was a fun idea. Was there a detail we incorporated that you still think is brilliant?
Johnston: The stucco-texture finish of the interior of the walls—I thought that was so successful. It has a kind of roughness might seem almost off-putting, but it really grounds. It’s an example of something that maybe we wouldn’t normally do, but it really heightened the contrast between the precise geometry of the house and the primitiveness of its finishes and colors, which are sort of earthy and almost minerally. I find it very surprising.
It’s a collaboration in the best sense—it brought us all to a place that we wouldn’t be on our own. That’s a really important way of being in the world, for us as architects, and finding fellow travelers without ego and with trust.
Christensen Egelund: Is it the smallest house you’ve ever built?
Johnston: It might be. If you don’t count the courtyard, it’s tiny.
Christensen Egelund: And the land is quite big. We could have cut down some trees to give us more room to build on, but we wanted the challenge: to pare it back to the essentials and refine them.
Johnston: The courtyard is almost double the size of the structure itself—it’s actually a room open to the sky. In all our projects, we think about how one arrives at a work of architecture as what primes one’s mind to receive the experience, whether it’s a dwelling or a museum. We thought: you drive down the narrow dirt road along the pond in this little haven, with the pavilion at the end of it. Then you park and cross the meadow on foot to arrive in the courtyard. It doesn’t have much utility, technically, but it’s a transition—it resets your sense of temperature, scale, and color before you enter the house.
We could have done that with less space, but the scale makes you pause. The same is true with the bathroom—it’s unexpected. Even though it’s a place of utility, we made it so big and open—there’s no shower enclosure; it looks onto the meadow. It resets your expectations. The compartmentalization of our lives doesn’t exist there; the house breaks down those boundaries.
Christensen Egelund: Do all your houses take 5 years to build when you’re out in the wilderness?
Johnston: Good things take time. So much has changed since we started this project. It seems that, more and more, people want distance from the centers of culture that they inhabit. COVID was obviously a big part of it; economic shifts are too. We’ve begun doing more projects in rural settings—an artist compound in Sharon, Connecticut, some things in Big Sur…Your vision for the Pavilion, to have it be a restorative place for creative people, is important to all of us. Now, it feels more urgent.
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