Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1387793
QUIET HOUSE BY REBECCA SHERMAN. PHOTOGRAPHY PÄR BENGTSSON. ART DIRECTION MICHELLE AVIÑA. ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIOR DESIGN BENTLEY TIBBS. PORTRAIT TONY SOLIS. ARCHITECT BENTLEY TIBBS' HUSHED BUNGALOW NEAR WHITE ROCK LAKE WAS BUILT WITH NATURAL LIGHT, SIMPLE MATERIALS, AND A SOUTHERN MODERN SENSIBILITY. W hen ar- c h i t e c t B e n t l e y Tibbs was a c h i l d g r o w i n g up in the Mississippi Delta, he and his brothers built forts in the hay barn. A weathered old structure hundreds of feet long, it had a roof full of holes that cast shafts of sunlight across the barn. Dust swirled in the light, and he was mesmerized. "The whole space was pierced with these vibrant columns of light, and the dust made them appear almost solid," he remembers. "That was the beginning of how I understood light could be used as a structural material." Tibbs' elegant design sensibility — which he calls Southern modernism — was shaped by his early years and later refined by his mentors. "In the Delta, all the buildings were agricultural farm buildings, just falling down. The old wood, the sound of rain hitting the metal roof and the light coming through — all that was so lush and beautiful," he says. At Texas A&M in the early '90s, he studied architecture under British modernist Malcolm 46