Casa Kohn

The residents of Alto Aragon, a drab 16-story apartment building on the Avenida 12 de Octubre in Quito, look down onto the roofs and gardens of one of the finest modernist houses in Ecuador. Seen from the busy six-lane road, the flat cornice of the house is just visible above a high garden wall that curves down a side road, leading to two doorways: one sized for a car, the other, at a more human scale, opening onto lush greenery. 

When the Czech architect and painter Karl Kohn designed the house for his family 75 years ago, it was at the edge of the city, where unpaved streets faded into the rolling countryside. His wife, Vera Kohn, recalls that when they moved into the house in 1949, it “was like a hacienda, where cows and donkeys wandered by”; Katya Kohn Bernasconi, one of their ...