THE WAREHOUSE

Graves Residence
1977 - Present
Princeton, NJ, United States

In the 1970s, Michael Graves came across an overgrown ruin in the middle of a residential block in Princeton, which reminded him of rural buildings that he had seen in Italy when studying at the American Academy in Rome. A former rental warehouse, the building had been constructed in a Tuscan vernacular style in the 1920s by Italian stonemasons working on Collegiate Gothic buildings at Princeton University. Graves renovated it as his residence, converting the truck dock into an entrance courtyard, replacing the hand-crank elevator with a stair, carving new openings for windows and doors, and removing 44 storage cells to transform the house into an orderly sequence of well-proportioned rooms. Graves often considers the Warehouse as a “laboratory” for experimentation with ideas about domesticity, where architecture and artifacts come together in well-appointed interiors. The house is carefully furnished with his extensive collections of books, art, furniture and objects, combining antiques with his own designs.