The artist’s house is embraced by the landscape.

The artist at work in his studio.

Sunaryo, one of Indonesia’s most eminent artists, came to the conclusion in 2008 that he required a new painting studio, whereupon he decided to build a studio with a small living space on a steep hillside site he owned at Meta Wangi, north of Bandung.¹ He had earlier reconstructed a traditional Javanese timber dwelling acquired in Solo on the upper part of the site, alongside the entrance, with the intention of providing accommodation for visiting artists and performers at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, the nearby art center, which is now visited by an average of 30,000 people every year.

By the beginning of 2009, Sunaryo’s new studio project was “ on site ” and the artist, armed with his own sketches, was personally supervising the construction. In a little over one year, it was complete. The accommodation is minimal. A large painting studio, the raison d’être of the project, is located in the sub-basement, with a covered outdoor veranda and courtyard accessed by a ramp from the site entrance to facilitate the arrival and removal of Sunaryo’s canvases.

The entrance to the living accommodation is a processional route from the main gate, traversing the hillside along a path of large flat stones and timber balks set in grass, with glimpses of the building withheld until it is finally revealed. The living accommodation consists of a simple bedroom and a small breakfast room with attached kitchen, accessed directly from a spacious living space. A bathroom and a guest reception space with a daybed are located at the rear of the house. The focus of the living room is a huge table hewn from the trunk of a single large tree, capable of seating sixteen people, and set in a sunken pit with fixed seating around it. The table is just one of a several places around the house for groups of family, visiting artists or friends to gather. Each sitting area has a different perspective: the guest reception space overlooks a koi pond and is a quiet place for reflection; a veranda outside the living room gives a view over verdant green agricultural terraces to the south, and there is a bench where visitors can remove their shoes before entering the house.

The house enjoys natural ventilation.

A splash of red highlights the principal structural roof member of the garden pavilion.

The broad veranda outside the artist’s studio where his recently completed works await collection

The focus of the living area is a huge sunken table hewn from a single tree.

The pedestrian entrance to the house via an external veranda. Each sitting area gives a different perspective.

At the lower level, reached by an external staircase alongside a tiny waterfall, there is a thatch-roofed pavilion and two more external sitting places, each offering a different place to contemplate nature and the activities of farmers on the opposite side of the valley. The artist speaks of “ my small house ” with immense pleasure and tells a story, no doubt apocryphal, of how he built it without informing his wife, and when she asked where he was going each day, he replied, “ I am just going down to the garden. ” He explains that he wanted to construct a place of silence for painting and contemplation. In the event, he suffered a heart attack when the house was half complete, and upon his recovery his doctor advised he swim every day. The result was that a swimming pool was added at the end of the lower terrace.

The design is an inscription on the 1.6-ha site, a work of art in the landscape. Sunaryo is a genius, and there is magic in everything he produces. Below the house is an extensive terraced garden with rows of vegetables and fruit. He has also planted 1,000 trees. There are splashes of red that highlight certain details—a device he often employs in his paintings. Here, the sudden appearance of red can be found in a handrail or a roofing member or the smooth infill of resin in a knot in the timber dining table. Even the artist’s spectacles have red frames!

In the design and construction of the house, there is a direct connection between the end user and the designer through the artisans who constructed the house using simple technology and the skills available to most builders of kampong houses. Sunaryo did the drawings for the house on scraps of paper, canvas or cardboard that were to hand. Sunaryo’s neighbors, in the spirit of gotong-royong, constructed the house, although he is quick to point out that he optimized the abilities of everyone who offered to help—and he paid for their assistance but not excessively so that money was spent in an economical way. This immediacy is evident and contrasts sharply with industrial practices of house construction where the end user might be five steps removed from the contractor, with an intermediary role being played by the architect, the architectural assistant, the contractor and the craftsman.

The house is constructed with what, at first, seem permeable bamboo walls except that, because he feels the cold in Bandung, Sunaryo has inserted an insulating leaf of brick between the inner and outer layers of woven bamboo screens, and the openings in the external wall can be closed with frameless glass windows. Elsewhere he employs a variety of tactile materials: rough-hewn timber, concrete with exposed aggregate and plaited bamboo.

Sunaryo has a creative family. His wife Heti Komalasari is a skilled artist in her own right, being much in demand for traditional Sumbanese wedding makeup and sometimes traveling abroad to organize the wedding preparations for Indonesian diasporas. His daughter Mita, a fashion designer, works with Liz Claibourne in New York, and one of his sons, Arin, studied at St Martins College of Art London and two of his paintings are hung in the living area.

A small shimmering blue lap pool is cut into the hillside.

The path to the entrance is a processional route traversing the hillside.

A contemplative guest reception space overlooks a koi pond.

Ultimately, the studio and accompanying living space is not architecture with a capital A but together with the garden it is essentially an “ art installation ” resulting from a spatial strategy comprising lines, objects, focal points and vistas. This ability to “ play with space, objects and forms ” is acknowledged as one of Sunaryo’s great skills, and here he transfers the techniques that are evident in his paintings onto a larger canvas without borders.² The internal spaces and the framing of views in and out of the house are thrilling, and there are lessons that all architects can learn from the relationship of the building to the landscape.

Framed views of the ever-changing landscape from the dining room and the guest reception area.

The lower terrace overlooks verdant agricultural land.

Footnotes

1   I published an earlier house built by Sunaryo in The Asian House: Contemporary Houses of Southeast Asia, Singapore: Select Books, 1993, pp. 30–5. Seventeen years later, by chance, I met the artist again at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space.

2   I Bambang Sugiharto, Sunaryo: Borderless Universe, Bandung: Yayasan Selasar Sunaryo, 2007, p. 117.