DESIGN TAVERN: NEW INTERVIEW WITH ARCHITECT OF THE ‘CULLEN HOUSE’

Posted February 9th, 2009 By: Team Switzerland 8 Comments »

After such an amazing response from their original article about the “Cullen House” in the movie, Design Tavern has come back with new pictures and an interview with Jeff Kovel, who was the architect of the amazing house.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

Kovel explains that his inspiration comes from many different architectural sources. â€œI love many progressive architects from all eras of modernism, I appreciate the periods prior as well. There isnâ€™t a subject I would rather talk about.â€

As Iâ€™m sure many of you can relate, Jeff Kovel and Skylab architecture became known to me through the film Twilight; what many of us have come to know as the Cullen residence is actually the â€˜Hoke Residenceâ€™, so I asked Jeff about how the house came to be.

â€œThe Hoke residence was originally built as a â€™specâ€™ house [This simply means it was built, with the speculation of finding a suitable buyer], or a project built without a client as a development for sale.

After two days on the market, the house was purchased by the director of footwear design at Nike, John Hoke. Following a cover story in a northwest architecture publication, The Hokeâ€™s were approached by a film location scout, a little film called Twilight.â€

â€œWe designed the house in 2006, completed construction in 2007. We have designed an additional residence next door that will begin construction once we locate another vampireâ€

â€œThis December, we took our staff to see the movie to start our holiday party. We all loved it. We have been receiving fan mail from all over the world, including many inquiries for the house plans – contacts from Croatia, The Philippines, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne Australia among others.â€

To read the complete article, click here.

And to view all the pictures from the Cullen/Hoke house in our gallery, click here.

(Thanks Tesorito)

I can’t get enough of the pictures of the house. It is so amazing and I think they did a perfect job picking the Cullen’s house. It’s also really interesting to hear how the house came about and was put in the ‘Twilight’ movie.

What did you think of this article? And what about the house itself – do you think this was a suitable pick for the Cullen house?

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Tina

The “Cullens” House couldn’t be more Perfect. Its Amazing. A huge Thank You to the Hokeâ€™s for letting Twilight use their Amazing House.
jenb

This house is amazing! It definitely works for the Cullens. I really hope it’ll make appearances in the upcoming sequels! Thank you to the Hoke family for letting it be used in Twilight.
AllisCullen

I LOVE the house. At first, I wasn’t sure, but it’s SO OPEN, just like the way SM describes it being.

I, too, hope that the house appears again, in future movies.
creamy

Not to play the devil’s advocate here, but I thought the house was wrong in a major way.

In the book, it is described as a three story,faded white mansion that could probably be a hundred years old. Also, it was sitting in the middle of a meadow/lawn.

Not one of these points were replicated in the film. The house used was brown, modern in the extreme, and definitely not positioned in the middle of a large lawn. I was stunned the film makers missed the boat so completely.

The inside was almost as bad. I can see that this is a nice house, but, to portray this particular house as the one Esme obviously lavished her considerable talents on (in the book), and her usual preference for antiquities, was for me a huge mistake.

Other than having glass walls on the back, there was nothing modern in the Cullens’ house.
Miss Cullen

I think the house is beautiful! At first i was disppointed because i imagined it different form reading the books, the main thing for me was the color, in the books it’s supposed to be white whereas in the film it’s more wooden. I still think it’s amazing though, and really suits the Cullen’s expensive taste
x
http://twilightersanonymous.com/design-tavern-new-interview-with-jeff-kovel-architect-of-cullen-house-twilight-movie.html JessieAnnMcKennaCullen

I think that house is amazing! But I agree it wasn’t how I pictured it in the book, but then again the house is beautiful and I think it was perfect in the movie, I just wish they had shown more of it, but it’s cool they posted more pictures of it. It wasn’t they way it is in the book, true, but they said from the beginning they weren’t out to make Twilight the book, they were making Twilight the movie, so all and all, I like it
ajames966

The house is soooooo awesome.
webdiva

An absolutely great house, and a much better choice than a circa-1910 home would have been.

Houses that are a century older simply wouldn’t have — and wouldn’t be able to have — the open plan design that Meyer describes in her book: the structural supports would be distributed differently. An old house would have to be severely rebuilt and modified to accommodate an open plan. The Hoke House, however, is already built with such a floor plan and is suitable for the highly wooded site that is typical not just in the Columbia River Gorge area where the house is located, but also the Olympic peninsula where Forks is. One can easily imagine such a house down the road from Forks, nestled up against the Hoh rainforest, near to the Quinault River basin and Olympic National Park.

It’s a great house, and the filmmakers were damned lucky to be able to get it for Twilight. A pity that New Moon and Eclipse weren’t filmed there; however, if indeed Breaking Dawn is to be filmed back in the Portland area again (and it certainly looks that way, at this point) and the production company can re-access to the Hoke House, that would be perfect — imagine what a lovely wedding could be arranged there, complete with the twinkle lights all along the drive form the highway to the house! Not to mention the all-important later scenes during Bella’s problematic ‘illness’ and subsequent developments, like discovering Esme’s cottage. I’m sure there’s something suitable nearby in the Gorge. I look forward to seeing the Hoke House on film again.