“Her son and stepdaughter live across the meadow and have a couple of young kids,” says Ben Waechter, FAIA. “She wanted a house close to the grandkids, and this was a special property. She asked for a single-story house of about 2,300 square feet with three bedrooms and two and a half baths. That was about it. The real design driver was the meadow, trying to elevate the experience of the meadow with whatever this new house would become.” His initial sketches explored ways to embrace the adjacent public space, called Madison Meadow, without being completely exposed to the locals enjoying the park. That, and the square-shaped lot, led to the development of a squar-ish courtyard house with a private meadow, or “clearing,” at its center. “On one hand, the public meadow has big beauty to it; we wanted the building to be subservient but also have a scale appropriate to the large-ness of the meadow,” Ben says. “So we envisioned the house as having a sculptural presence.” The completed design ac-complishes the delicate task of standing out while blending in. With its walls, roof, and soffits wrapped in standing seam metal, the 2,000-square-foot house reads as a monolithic, flat-roofed struc-ture one and a half stories tall, “as if carved from a single shape,” Ben says. “The idea was that the simple shape would fit well within the bigness of the meadow” while respecting the scale of mostly one-story houses around it. Inside, however, the cantilevered rooflines slope down toward the courtyard. Pitching all the rainwater to the inside eliminated the need for a gutter system and its seasonal upkeep. More poetically, the design invites the owner to experience rain as a kind of theater. “When it rains, the roof is a dynamic sculpture in a way,” Ben says. “You see the water falling in sheets if it’s really pour-ing.” The courtyard’s frothy native grasses were selected for their toler-ance to the heavier downpours that occur in winter, and an overflow system diverts excess water outside the building footprint. A Sense of Place Much like the natural world outside its door, the architecture achieves a harmonious balance. Ben en-visioned the floor plan as four pavilions—one anchoring each corner of the courtyard—with the cantilevered rooflines providing continuous outdoor cover. Linking the pavilions are four terraces, or breezeways—two open and two This page: Interior finishes are restrained and serene to keep the focus on the natural world beyond. VOL. 5, 2023 RESIDENTIALDESIGNMAGAZINE.COM 55
Residential Design VOL5 2023: Page 55
