Friday, Sep. 14, 1962
Fatemeh's Fancy
The Iranian princess had been educated in South Carolina and had lived in California, and for her residence in the suburbs of Teheran she wanted a California-style redwood ranch house. So naturally she hired a pair of American architects to build it--and naturally they itched to design a house in the Persian tradition. Architects usually have their way: the result is the jewel-like residence pictured on the opposite page.
The palace that Architects Benjamin Brown and Spero Daltas designed for the Shah's younger sister, Fatemeh, is walled in travertine, teakwood and glass, and alive with water and sunlight. But the most striking feature is the roof. Columns formed by eight 2-in. steel tubes rise and fan out to support octagonal canopies of glazed brick, interspersed here and there with clear glass skylights.
Boy Masons. Blessed with a clay that bakes into beautiful glazed bricks, Iran uses them extensively in its architecture; but the art of glazing had slipped to the point that the architects had difficulty in finding an artisan who could make the green, blue-grey and brown bricks needed for the ceiling. Finally they located one Oosta Yah-Yah. who had trained under a U.S. ceramicist, and he set to work making the bricks. Among the masons was a group of remarkable boys, 12 to 14 years old. Working in teams of three, the teen-aged bricklayers laid the 4-in.-thick, lozenge-shaped glazed brick literally on thin air, forming arches between the steel ribs of the umbrellas just curved enough to hold up. One boy would build this ceramic webbing, a second boy stayed below and tossed wet bricks up, while a third constantly mixed the quick-setting gypsum mortar that held the flying Persian carpet of brick firmly in place. The holes between the bricks were chinked with more gypsum from below and with concrete poured over the top to form the weather surface.
Swimming on Wednesday. The pavilion, which has four bedrooms on the upper levels (reached by gentle ramps instead of stairs), a dining room, a petit salon, an office and a kitchen in addition to the main reception room on the main floor, is really an island in the midst of a gushing stream. Icy water from melted mountain snow burbles beside the driveway, continues through the house in blue and gold glazed tile channels, tumbling over alabaster barriers and out into the garden. The chilled water is also used to air-condition the house in summer, must be heated before reaching the swimming pool, where on Wednesdays the Shah and Queen Farah Diba and other members of the royal household come to visit Princess Fatemeh for a swim.
The 10,000-sq.-ft. pleasure dome cost $200,000, including carpets and furnishings: Barcelona chairs, Eero Saarinen pedestal tables, sectional sofas on wall-to-wall carpeting. All of these fittings were made in India, but they are basically American in design: there, at least, Fatemeh got something that might grace a ranch house.
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