Good morning everyone,

Today we turn our attention to women who design their own buildings – not because they have any architectural training, but because they have the money and power to do so and think it could be cool. This attitude of, well, why wouldn’t I create a building? comes from a combination of stubbornness and delight in one’s surroundings that it’s very hard not to admire. Many thanks to friend and subscriber Cecily for links and chats around this topic.

These are ordered from the most to the least supernatural, I assume this is the sort of attention to detail that you appreciate so much about this newsletter.

Sara Losh’s church! It is not clear to any historians how somebody with no architectural training created one of the best and most unusual churches in England, but she did and used her own money to fund it.

Simon Jenkins, in his lovely book England's Thousand Best Churches, calls St. Mary's "one of the most eccentric small churches in England" but thinks it a masterpiece with no clear antecedents, no pattern from which it derives. Its architect was "a single original mind, … an individual genius." That genius was not a professional architect—indeed, lacked any formal architectural training—and was merely the chief landowner in the vicinity of Wreay.

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2013/julaug/mystery-of-sarah-losh.html

Sarah Winchester’s house! This has been an enduring source of fascination to me since I first heard about it, aged 17. The widow of a gun millionaire designed a house that would surely be the single most terrifying place to be in an earthquake on one of the more well documented faultlines. I suppose all those doors mean there are a lot of doorframes to stand under. There is a lot of appeal in the idea of waking up and deciding that today is a new staircase day.

Sarah Winchester lived at time when it was highly unusual for women to be architects. She wasn’t licensed, so her own home was the perfect place—and the only place—where she could practice architecture. Whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with more than 150 rooms, 2000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, two basements, and one shower. She spent nearly all of her life being an architect.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mystery-house/

Jackie Collins’ mansion! She also designed her own mansion, based in part on a Hockney painting she and her husband liked. She can’t get the painting so she builds a house that looks like the painting. Of course.

The house took three years to build. Her husband died when it was finished. But she made the half-crazy creation of the house sound fun—a good memory. She had drawn sketches of what she wanted, and her husband also contributed: two amateur architects. She had imagined not a house exactly, but a David Hockney swimming pool with house attached. “I’d always wanted the Hockney painting A Bigger Splash,” she explained. “But I could never get it. So I thought the best alternative was to have my own Hockney pool that looked like the painting.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/jackie-collins-hollywood-mansion

Happy building,

Alex.