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- Architect Jeff Kovel’s first solo project was this home in the Portland Heights of Portland, Ore. Photos.
Fans of “Twilight” know the name Jeff Kovel because the architect designed the home occupied by the Cullens, the featured vampire family in the film. But back before Twilight groupies started sending him fan mail, Mr. Kovel designed a home in the Portland Heights area of Portland, Ore., featured Thursday as “House of the Day” on WSJ.com. That three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom home was the first Mr. Kovel designed with his own firm, Skylab Architecture.
The Portland Heights home started as a spec house, or “an incubator project,” as Mr. Kovel calls it. “When I went out on my own I was 27, we didn’t really have a client base, so I conceived of [this project] as a way to establish our firm and our capabilities,” says Mr. Kovel, now 37.
Construction took 14 months, and the home was completed in 2001, selling just before September 11. However, the terrorist attacks on that day led the New York buyer to back out of the deal, Mr. Kovel says.
The architect himself moved into the home for six months. “It was a pretty interesting experience to live in it after building it,” he says. “It was just a real learning experience for me, to experience the theories day in and day out, to watch how the light changes in the house…”
The house’s current owners, Scott and Pam Gibson, purchased it for $2.35 million about eight years ago. They hired Mr. Kovel to make a few changes, including the addition of a 5,000-bottle wine storage building. They listed the house for $2.79 million and moved to Jackson Hole, Wyo. in October.
The home featured in the “Twilight” movie is also in Portland, Ore. Fans of the vampire flick know the house as the “Cullen House,” but Mr. Kovel calls it the “Hoke House” for its real-life owner, John Hoke, the director of footwear design at Nike. Mr. Hoke bought the home, also built on spec, just a few days after it hit the market in 2007, Mr. Kovel says. The home includes a 14-foot cantilever and has three bedrooms. It measures 4,896 square feet and has an open floor plan. In a 2008 cover story before “Twilight” was filmed, the magazine Portland Spaces compared it to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
Soon after Mr. Hoke and his wife, Karen, moved into their new home, a film scout approached them and asked to use it in the “Twilight” movie, Mr. Kovel says.
In an interview about the Hoke’s home, Mr. Kovel told the blog Design Tavern that he and his staff saw the movie together and have received fan mail from all over the world.
Another Cullen home featured in the Twilight series’ second installment “New Moon” — but not designed by Mr. Kovel — is currently on the market in Vancouver, British Columbia. That five-bedroom, four-bathroom house is listed for $2.998 million. Renovated in 2001, the post-and-beam-style home has a great room, a pool and a koi pond.
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