Aston Martin Reveals ‘Sylvan Rock’, Its First Home
Step inside the first private residence offered by the British marque.
2 min
It’s no secret that Aston Martin’s design work is well appreciated outside the walls of the automotive industry.
And as such, the famous marque has dipped its toe into a number of endeavours including motorcycles, helicopters, boats and has now unveiled its first residence.
Designed in partnership with S3 Architecture, Sylvan Rock is a home set on a 22.2-hectare property in New York’s green Hudson Valley.
Accessed via a 610-metre driveway bordered by trees and rock walls, the main residence sees an angular form that takes its cues from the rock formations that make the surrounds so unique.
The home is encased in blackened cedar and glass and features four bedrooms, four bathrooms, two half baths and three-car automotive gallery garage (hello, lairs and galleries program). Elsewhere sees a custom wine cellar – wrapped in Aston’s signature cross-hatched lattice design, pool and an 81sqm pool house.
The living spaces give way to nature through double-height ceiling and walls of glass with a columnar fireplace the showpiece. Naturally, the interiors are furnished by Aston Martin home while the kitchen is informed by a monolithic island and private dining table fitted with Miele appliances, column refrigeration and the latest cooking tech.
The primary bedroom suite is glass-clad and cantilevers over the rock ledge to take in views of the Catskills mountains in the distance. Here you’ll also find a walk-in closet complete with a night bar for a pre-bed tipple.
The main bathroom sees two-person shower, double vanity, soaking tub and more of those natural views.
Not limited to the singular structure, the property also features multi-functional guest house “pods”, a treehouse, and an agricultural garden.
Best yet, it can be yours for approx. $10.8 million; sylvanrock.com
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
2 min
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
