Brevard House

Brevard House

Our clients purchased the property on which this house was built several years before design and construction began. The 36-acre mountainside property, which abuts Pisgah National Forest, was located adjacent to a family member’s land and offered ample opportunities for bike and hiking trails, as well as a private homesite surrounded by mature forests.

The client’s overriding goals for the project were to build something minimally invasive and appropriate to its environment, while taking advantage of the natural amenities afforded by the site. Parents of two teenage kids, and with privacy in mind, the clients wanted to separate the main living quarters from the guest and kid’s bedrooms. Given the wooded landscape surrounding the house, they also requested that the master bedroom be designed so that it would feel immersed in the landscape. Lastly, they wanted to orient towards the two prominent view corridors to the southeast and southwest of the property. With these prompts in mind, we devised a layout with the main living and master bedroom program located in one form and the guest and kid’s bedrooms in a separate form. We then pulled these forms apart and torqued them, creating an internal courtyard that opens to the southwest, facing Kagle Mountain. We shifted the forms slightly in opposite directions to create a degree of privacy and autonomy for the guest wing and to cantilever the master bedroom over a steep topographical drop-off, thereby creating the desired effect of the bedroom feeling suspended in the trees. The front façade design was determined by the use and typology of spaces on the interior side of the wall. The exterior rhythm and composition of the bays transmit the function on the interior where, for instance, a two-foot bay with no window would be a closet, while a five-foot bay with a window would be a bathtub, and so forth.

Movement through all interior and exterior spaces is subtly orchestrated with a spine of circulation marked by a continuous nine-foot cast-in-place concrete wall. The wall becomes the predominant organizing element in the design: extending to welcome visitors at the parking area, moving through the interior of the house, and continuing out to the rear yard. This axial feature, while clearly man-made, blurs the distinctions between interior and exterior spaces by existing continuously in both, visible throughout the property.

The earthy material palette consists of concrete, wood, and Corten steel in an effort to integrate the house into its environment. The materials are meant to weather over time, marking the same natural processes and unpredictable changes that occur in the surrounding forest. The asymmetrical layout and introverted courtyard, coupled with an abundance of glass, creates an interesting interplay of light on the building forms throughout the course of the day. The Brevard House is a unique spot from which to observe the passage of time.