Kettal VDL Penthouse

Kettal VDL Penthouse

Several years before Dion Neutra’s death in 2019, Architect Antonio Navarro, creative director of the Kettal furniture company, approached Dion with the idea of adapting the design of the penthouse on the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences as an aluminum prefabricated garden pavilion. The two worked to enlarge the original design and add a bathroom where a closet had previously been. The Neutra practice had always been interested in demountable prefabrication.

Indeed in Chapter 42 of Survival Through Design, Richard Neutra pointed out that when designer and fabricators are working together under one roof it is possible to develop a sympathetic cooperation that is hard to achieve in the field when communication is attempted with complicated plans and specifications. This has certainly been the case at Kettal. The pavilion’s aluminum components are designed for disassembly, shipping and reassembly. So Dion Neutra’s last project echoed the explorations of his father in the early 1920s.