2023
Two new buildings completed in 2023, a guest house and cabin, are the most recent additions to a family compound that has been evolving over the last decade. Prompted by the owners’ need for a discrete office space while working from home, removed from the everyday distractions in their main house, the cabin is a free-standing structure set in a clearing of the woods and at a walkable distance from their primary suite; the building’s simple massing and cedar board and batten siding tie in with the vernacular architecture of the several barns and other farm structures on the site. Occupying most of the main level, the office itself is dominated by a monumental rubble stone fireplace at one end while the wall opposite opens through pocketing doors to a screened porch overlooking the freshwater pond adjacent to the property. Aside from its rough-hewn oak timber trusses, the room is finished entirely in plain-sawn butternut — custom-milled as acoustical planking at the ceiling. Further acoustical details, daylight-controlling motorized shades at all windows and carefully modulated room lighting are seamlessly integrated within this rustic context to accommodate back-to-back zoom calls. A stair tucked behind the chimney mass — also finished in butternut — leads to a lower-level wine cellar and tasting room in oak and butternut with a reclaimed stone floor.
Within eyeshot of the cabin, a small rubble stone shed modeled after a livestock shelter conceals a/c units, a transformer and generator.
Set on a knoll at the far end of the property and overlooking the same pond, the guest house is inspired by traditional New England connected barns, in which the farmhouse and ancillary animal structures are appended semi-discretely and linearly to the main barn. Here, however, the barn is set at the center of the composition — as a living/dining room with open kitchen — with dual appendages extending off its gable ends as one- and two-bedroom guest suites reached via screened porches. As the exterior detailing in any one of our precedents will often vary from vernacular/utilitarian to a more formalized expression with classical influences, the progression here is from the cedar board-and-batten siding of the center barn, to the New England shingle siding/flat wood casings of one guest “wing”, to the pedimental gable and Greek-revival corner pilasters of the opposite wing.
True to form, the guest house’s central component is a post-and-beam barn structure engineered for year-round use in its particularly harsh New England environment. Anchored dramatically at one end by a chimney mass (by the same mason group responsible for the cabin), the great room of the barn opens along its sides through wide sliders to a random-laid granite pond view terrace and, opposite, to a low-walled rustic garden overlooking a meadow. Interior detailing in the guest suites follows a New England farmhouse vernacular, with rough-sawn whitewashed flat trim set nearly flush against open-pore plaster walls and — in many spaces — wood plank and exposed rafter ceilings.
