The year is 1977. Gert Wingårdh resigns from the security of employment and launches Gert Wingårdh Architecture. He is young, inexperienced, and on his way up in the world as an architect. Now he’s finally going to get a chance to design his very first house. It becomes a personal journey from the foggy west coast of Sweden to the sublime Zen of Japan and back again, always on the verge of catastrophe.

The Hansson house can be regarded as like a kind of biography, and the reader can follow along on a journey through time from the overcrowding of the 1930s to the order and clarity of the functionalist era — everything in its place.

Like the Sand and Kristina houses, the design is a picture book full of authentic, candid pictures of what everyday life in the house can look like. We get to see the illustrations, building permits, and as-built drawings people encounter in a real construction project. It’s the real thing from start to finish.

But a failure is not a catastrophe. We need to fail if we’re going to develop, try new approaches, and discover unexpected solutions. But daring to fail takes courage. And here the architect’s very first house may perhaps hold the key to his successful career—that he was given the chance to get it wrong and to get it right. “Very few are given the luxury of getting to make almost every mistake in their first house,” says Wingårdh. “Because of my friendship with the Hanssons I eventually got a chance to fix those mistakes one at a time.”

About the Wingårdh’s Villas series:

Wingårdh’s Villas is a series of books in which Gert and Karin Wingårdh try to explain how an architect thinks. What is it that actually makes a building turn out the way it does? We try to get inside the minds of both the client and the designer. What role does the site play? How does the size of the budget and the client’s resources impact the design? And what about timeless form—or the spirit of today?

The book series treats one house at a time and spans the Wingårdhs’ entire careers, from the late 1970s to the firm’s most recently completed work. We get to follow along to admire what went right, but also to laugh at (or cry over) what went wrong. The book is both entertaining and educational, a kind of cookbook for homebuilding, but without any detailed recipes—every place is unique.

It is published by Langenskiöld.

For more information or other questions, call Klara Grape at 010 - 788 11 19 or email klara.grape@wingardhs.se.