The project was to renovate, enlarge, and respect the form of an Eighteenth Century homestead built in 1734. The Spartan living conditions of the early settlers and the simple clean lines of their architecture were the inspiration to formulate a minimal design solution.
Concept
The initial investigations for the addition was to produce a design sympathetic to the traditional style, but the solutions felt weak and uncomplimentary to the simplicity of the original form. Trailer homes are a common site in rural Columbia County, New York and while there aesthetic is generally of the lowest order there is something compelling about their simple rectilinear form; this became the conceptual catalyst for the addition. The Spartan living conditions of the early settlers and the simple clean lines of their architecture were the inspiration to formulate a minimal design solution.
The Project
The design for the house developed organically; stripping back various additions and removing interior partitions from previous renovations revealed a classic house form, emulating a child’s perception of a house replete with four windows, a door, and sloped roof with a chimney on top.
The oldest surviving window was used as a template for the replacement of all the windows, new wide board cedar siding and roof shingles gave the original cottage an eternal image consistent with its eighteenth century origins. The addition’s rectilinear form is separated from the house by a continuous glass gasket and the exterior walls are clad in CorTen steel, which will rust and complement the cedar siding of the house.
The house was planned with two bed rooms and a bath room upstairs, living room and dining room down stairs separated by a through wall fireplace. The addition contains the Kitchen, guest bedroom, shower room on the ground floor and an exercise room, sauna and steam room in the cellar. The cellar has a large glass door that looks out over the lawn to the orchard. Internally the house’s only surviving finish was about a third of its original wide board floor, which were beautiful 1 1/2 inch thick 16-foot long boards of white pine some widths of which exceeded 24 inches.
A search around wood salvage yards and investigations of contemporary alternatives produced nothing. Then out of the blue fourteen hundred square feet of eighteenth century wide board flooring appeared at a local antique shop, having been salvaged from a house demolished twenty years ago and then left to gather dust in someone’s barn. The wood was procured and installed in the house. The floors of the addition by contrast are finished in limestone, which was also used for the hearth of the central fireplace in the house. Other interior finishes were shared throughout the house, plaster, exposed oiled wood, and stainless steels.
The project started with the purchase of a much-neglected Eighteenth Century homestead in an apple orchard located in Columbia County, New York. The earliest recorded date for the house is 1734, however, many years of use and renovation have made the actual date unclear. Fabricated in huge hand hewn timbers the basic frame and form of the house conforms to the ‘H bent’ frame consistent with Dutch settlers of that time. This, some wide board flooring and a miraculously preserved wattle and daub wall in the field stone basement are about all that remained of the original house.
