Outside balcony of designer home

A practice devoted to the complete experience of home. A collective of designers, architects and craftspeople. Discretion and understatement characterise the Colvin Haven approach, in its architecture and in its interactions.

FOUNDATION

Twenty years in kitchens, not classrooms Gramercy Tavern, Gary Danko, and co-founding Mixt before the first Colvin Haven home was ever built. No architecture degree, no design training. What came instead was real: building out Mixt's restaurants, then designing Umah Tsuki from nothing. The discipline every good kitchen teaches carried straight through the best result is never the largest, it's the most precisely composed.

That instinct is the entire practice. Every material chosen for what it does, not what it announces. Every room built around how a body actually wants to move through a day. Nothing added that isn't earning its place the same rule that once applied to a plate, now applied to a home.

The philosophy hasn't changed. Only the medium.

Where Andrew once asked how food could nourish a persons body, mind, community. He now asks the same of the spaces they inhabit. A Colvin Haven home is, at its heart, an act of nourishment. Conceived entirely for one family. Completed entirely by hand.

Interior image of restaurants with dining booths

CRAFT

Every Colvin Haven home is built by Indonesian master craftsmen and artisans whose knowledge of local timber, stone, and joinery has passed through generations.

It's the core of how these homes get made. Colvin Haven doesn't design a home and then have it built. The two happen together, craftsman and founder, on site, for as long as each home takes. We offer a limited turnkey home to our clients.

Smiling man holding building materials
Man hoisting large trees onto a truck

INSPIRATION

Workers partway through constructing a house

The design language draws from two traditions at once. Japanese and Scandinavian, the two schools that understood minimalism before the word existed. Danish design in particular: furniture and interiors built on the same instinct as a well-run kitchen, nothing decorative, everything earning its place.

That instinct extends to how a home is organized around living, not just looking. Twenty years of service taught one thing above all: people gather in the kitchen, not the living room. So in every Colvin Haven home, the kitchen is never an afterthought it's the room the rest of the house is built around.

COLVINHAVEN © 2024