Kellogg: A 1970s house

Shanna Kellogg designed this house in the 1970s. Her father, the organic architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, engineered its roof: two barrel vaults of laminated timber that meet at a concrete chimney. Pat McGriff spent a decade building it by hand. I’ve loved it since the first photograph I saw, and rebuilding it was the best way I could think of to understand it.

The house builds itself in your browser, rib by rib and plank by plank. Nothing was scanned, traced or downloaded. Photographs of the real house were reference only, studied for proportion and light, and never shipped.

Procedural

Timber, limestone and glass, generated from numbers.

Real light

The sun sits where it is at the house right now.

Photoreal

The same house, path-traced in Blender overnight.

Two versions

One for people. A plain-text twin for machines.

It’s built with three.js, with no frameworks and no build step. The page you’re reading is the whole site.

Three rules I set myself:

1. 01

   Nothing ships that isn’t made in code.

   No photographs, scans or stock models. If it’s on screen, it was generated.

2. 02

   Silence.

   No audio, no video, no autoplay. A house this calm shouldn’t talk.

3. 03

   The same words for people and machines.

   A plain-text twin, so AI agents read the same story you do.

Constraints are a brief. Without them, AI will happily give you everything, and everything is nothing.

1. 01

   Research. Plans, press and photographs, read and cross-checked into a dimensioned brief of the house.

2. 02

   The spec. Every room, light, interaction and rule written down before a line of code.

3. 03

   The build. AI agents working in parallel on the house, the engine, the light and the games, with me reviewing every step.

4. 04

   The bake. A photoreal version, path-traced in Blender in about four hours on a laptop.

5. 05

   The review. Every room, in every light, on every screen size, screenshotted and judged. By AI first, then by me.

The tools were new. The job wasn’t: taste, decisions, and knowing when something isn’t right yet. That part was still mine.

There are more. Machines get the cheat sheet: /house.md.

I’m Matthew Bacon, a creative director with a soft spot for architecture. This house is what I make when nobody’s asked.

Or write to matt@meddle.studio, or find me on LinkedIn.

The human site is a recreation after a 1970s residence designed by Shanna Kellogg, with its arched roof structure engineered by Kendrick Bangs Kellogg. Each section is a place in the room, as I rebuilt it:

1. 00The threshold

   Standing on the terrace at the corner of a long timber vault at dusk. Through its arched glass end, pale decking glows between dark ribs, and a concrete chimney rises behind the roof.

2. 01The vault

   Low in the sunken living room, looking up into the vault: dark glulam ribs, pale decking, and slot skylights in the crown.

3. 02The hearth

   Eye level with the concrete chimney. A see-through firebox opens to the dining room on the other side, and three limestone steps run past it.

4. 03The table

   Up three steps, a long plank table under the vault.

5. 04The study

   A slab desk in the study under the cross vault. A 1970s terminal sits on it, and a window looks out to a koi pond.

6. 05The gallery

   Upstairs, looking west through the arched glass end, past the balcony and a Norfolk Island pine, to a thin line of Pacific.

7. 06The door

   A mahogany door to the garden stands ajar. Daylight falls on the limestone, and a small print hangs beside it.

The light follows the real time of day at the house. The view through the glass starts in marine layer and clears as you go deeper into the house. A Photoreal light shows the same house rendered ahead of time, in late-afternoon sun.