The house sits in the Five Fields neighborhood in Lexington, designed by The Architects Collaborative in the early 1950s. The original house saw many additions over time; the most recent addition, from the 1980s, never quite worked — its kitchen had become the pinch point of the whole house, the place where everyone wished to be and through which traffic to the rest of the rooms was forced to squeeze. The owners host often, want room for parents and children to come and go over the years, and asked for a house that could absorb all of those uses without giving up its calm.
The office removed the 1980s addition and built a new wing in its place, oriented to the backyard and the large sycamore that has always been the most generous thing on the site. The kitchen, dining, and living spaces now run as a single open volume along the rear of the house, opening onto a terrace through a long line of glazing. The pinch point is gone; the house is reorganized around its garden side rather than its street side. A wood ceiling carried by exposed beams runs continuously from the interior out under the roof overhang, so that the room and the terrace read as a single space when the doors are open.
A second small accessory dwelling sits off to the side, sized for one or two people and detached from the main house. Over the long arc of a family it can hold a college-age child, an aging parent, the owners themselves at some later point — or none of those, used instead as a workspace or a guest house in the meantime. The two buildings sit lightly together in the landscape, with a meadow and the original lawn between them. Construction is underway, with completion expected in summer 2027.
Civil Engineer · Patriot Engineering
