Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's principles of organic architecture, Brian Hemingway has sought out his own particular style of language that reflects his mature point of view. In a year-long sojourn with his family across Europe and North Africa, and many subsequent visits to South East Asia, Hemingway clarified the underlying principles of his private and public life among peoples and places far removed from British Columbia's shores.

Hemingway maintains a deep and abiding commitment to the craft and practice of West Coast architecture, landscape forms, cultural influences and crafted details. His residential homes are a bold and important phase in his more recent work. Hemingway's architectural ideas about homes, learned from such notable practitioners as William Morris, Green and Green, Bernard Maybeck, Frank Lloyd Wright and Fay Jones, lie behind these works. The spirit of organic design - unity through complexity- is paramount to his design decisions: concentration on movement through space evocative of ceremony and ritual, floor plans that allow for the play of light and serendipity while minimizing wall separations, connectedness to the outside world , playing with notions of inside and outside, and openings interlocked into each wall's structural rhythms. Each of these design decisions evokes intimations of natural harmony, intuition and integration.

Hemingway's architectural concern for organic principles may seem idiosyncratic, even precious. Yet his work represents the expression of a continuing romantic tradition that extends back in western civilization at least 200 years. His homes, crafted for just a few families, may seem undemocratic or even elitist, but by pursuing what he believes to be a more humane practice of architecture, Hemingway reminds us all of our relationship with nature, culture and our inner selves. In turn, this evokes the eternal questions of our place in time and space. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway believes that a house should endeavor to be designed as a temple for the soul.