RHD Award Year: 2018

The Lakeshore House investigates the seminal architectural typology of the Primitive Hut. Following the spirit of Laugier’s allegorical model, the Lakeshore House utilizes the form of the most basic representation of “house.” The extruded, gabled box is the ubiquitous signifier of a child’s drawing. The form eschews ornamentation in favor of simplicity, focusing instead on essentialities and restraint, a minimalist solution to one of Man’s most basic needs: to shelter.

The house itself is situated on a “throw away” sliver of land in the sought after, in-town Lake Claire neighborhood. In addition to the typical single-family setbacks, the parcel is further delineated by two stream buffers, a sanitary sewer easement, and the presence of the 100-year flood plain. These restrictions reduce the quarter-acre site to barely 1500 SF of buildable area. The close proximity of neighboring residences combined with challenging topography created additional concerns regarding privacy, sight lines, and vehicular access to any new structure.

The project’s clients, an established couple and their teenage child, developed a dense program brief. After the synthesis of multiple schemes, the final plans for the Lakeshore House called for a three-story volume connected vertically by an open riser stair, with a screened pavilion located to the rear. Sheltered parking was designed near the street, with access to the house provided via a steel pedestrian bridge across an existing stream. The majority of apertures are located at the rear, maximizing privacy and granting views of the wooded hillside to the west.

The Split Box House aims to create a quiet, restrained, escape from the excessively noisy digital world that overly stimulates our daily lives and is a reaction to the surrounding banal spec homes each a louder spectacle than the next. Simple and clean in its form, the house started as a twenty-two-foot wide extruded box. That width was chosen based on the distance a reasonable-sized wood truss can span. This ensured that no interior support walls were required, allowing for an uncomplicated open floor plan. Cut to the desired length based on the space requirements of the family, the box is subsequently split into public and private functions. The private portion is rotated ninety degrees around the sky-lit stair hall to maximize views to the serene woods behind the house.

A complimentary warm ipe wood, alluding to the softer interiors of the house, clads the cuts. The private functions, comprised of the bedrooms upstairs and the guesthouse on the main level, bridge across a covered breezeway creating an outdoor room with a view corridor to the woods and access to the main and guest house entrances. The public functions move through a series of low and tall spaces culminating in a double height sky-lit space that provides shifting light patterns throughout the day. A series of site walls, carefully nestled into the steep lot, cascade down the front hill from the street to create a terraced entrance garden that becomes the exposed foundation of the house.