The client had purchased sixty acres of land in the Berkshires with a small existing cabin from the previous owner, with the intent of eventually building a larger weekend home elsewhere on the property. We sited the new house on the edge of a steep hill that drops more than forty feet toward a pond at the base of the property, where the slope is best able to give the house a long view and a clear relationship to the water below.
The house straddles a hollow in the ground and lifts off the slope rather than cutting into it. A long horizontal upper level holds the living rooms and runs out over the steep grade on a faceted weathering steel armature; a smaller volume tucks underneath at the lower contour as a guest level. The northern sleeping section of the house is built of heavy stone, weighted to the ground and to the cooler side of the property; the southerly living section is clad in weathering steel, lighter and warmer, oriented to the view. The two materials register the two registers of the program directly.
A long internal stair connects the upper main level to the lower guest level, threaded with built-in sleeping nooks along its length and lit from above by a tall light shaft. The stair eventually lands at a roof terrace over the lower volume and continues out toward the pond. Inside the main living room, a small glass aperture in the floor looks down at a single boulder kept in place under the house — a reminder, while sitting near the wood stove, of the ground the building is hovering above.
