The Nimmo Glass House on Ricks Circle
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There are some pretty astonishing homes in Dallas. The Nimmo Glass House on Ricks Circle will always be in the top ten. It was a custom home built for owners who wanted the ultimate escape with excellent proximity to downtown Dallas. There’s no better location than Hillcrest Estate’s Ricks Circle, because it offers estate-sized living.
Joshua Nimmo, founder of Nimmo Architecture, designed the Glass House on a lovely site in a grove of mature live oak trees, which offer incredible views and privacy. After all, the entire point of a home encased in floor-to-ceiling glass is to be at one with your surroundings.
The concept for a residence made of glass began with architects Phillip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Johnson designed a home for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1948-49. It is considered his signature work and is now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Mies van der Rohe designed another of our best-known glass houses for Dr. Edith Farnsworth. It was finished in 1951 and served as her weekend retreat in Plano, Illinois. Known as the Farnsworth House, it is also a museum house owned and operated by the National Trust.
While the Nimmo Glass House clearly draws inspiration from its architectural predecessors, it’s far from being a museum piece. It’s a lively space that I’ve been lucky enough to experience in person. During my visit, a pack of boys was running around having a great time.
While it most certainly is a piece of art, it’s also a family-friendly piece of art.
Despite being encased in nine-foot, floor-to-ceiling glass, it’s solid. The 6,325-square-foot house was built with 60 tons of steel and 40 slabs of Calacatta marble.
Although the setting for this home was already beautiful, the award-winning landscape architecture firm Hocker did an absolutely phenomenal job of creating a landscape that looks as if it has always existed. Hocker features this home on their website, and they describe it perfectly.
Ricks Circle is a modern exercise in minimalism aimed to rest a single-story glass house in the landscape, amongst an established bosque of heritage live oak trees, as a work of art. A series of courtyards is formed throughout the site, both by the trees and the architecture. The home recedes from the street, with a hedge-screened entry courtyard. Within the largest court, a Roman bath-inspired pool rises just above the ground plane. Other courts offer verdant views from interior spaces and a small, raised activity lawn for children or pets. The home itself is perched on a cantilevered stone surround, allowing interior views to outdoor rooms while protecting the root zone of the site’s first inhabitants, its substantial trees.
Hocker
Eric Narasov has the Nimmo Glass House at 11345 W. Ricks Circle available for $8.9 million.
