With its abstract geometry and museum-quality exterior materials…
Securing municipal approval for a custom home project is seldom a casual affair. But in the case of this radically sculptural house, architect Warren Schwartz had a real job on his hands. The site, with its prominent frontage on a small, quiet pond on the outskirts of Boston, guaranteed the project would draw scrutiny. And it did, although not in quite the way Schwartz expected. “When we presented it to the town planning board,” he says, “the members wanted to know what the house would look like in the woods.” The architect explained that the building would be sensitive to its surroundings, wouldn’t intrude on the view from the pond, would work with the site’s existing contours, and … “Yes,” an official interrupted, “but what color are you going to paint it?”
One can forgive the town officials for missing the point. Two-dimensional drawings sometimes fail to do a building justice. In the case of this aptly named House on a Pond, the timeworn real estate cliché applies: Must see to appreciate.
Project Credits and Resources
Project credits:
Builder: Thoughtforms Corp., West Acton, Mass.; Architect: Schwartz/Silver Architects, Boston; Staircase fabricator: TriPyramid Structures, Westford, Mass.; Living space: Withheld; Site: Withheld; Construction cost: Withheld; Photographer: Alan Karchmer, with photo stylist Sandra Benedum, except where noted.
Resources:
Bathroom fittings and fixtures: Boffi USA, Dornbracht Americas; Bathroom and kitchen cabinets, interior paneling: TFC Studios; Dishwasher: Miele; Entry and patio doors, skylights/roof windows: EFCO Corp.; Fireplace: Moberg Fireplaces; Flooring (rubber): Mondo America; Garage doors: Cliff Compton Inc.; Garbage disposer: KitchenAid; Hardware: The Nanz Co.; HVAC equipment: Buderus, Lennox International, Viega North America; Insulation: Icynene; Interior doors: Herrick & White; Kitchen fittings and fixtures: Dornbracht Americas; Lighting fixtures: Lightolier; Oven: Gaggenau USA/Canada; Paints/stains/wall finishes: Benjamin Moore & Co.; Range: Wolf Appliance; Refrigerator: Sub-Zero; Trimwork: Herrick & White, TFC Studios; Windows: Amherst Woodworking, EFCO Corp.
Schwartz chose an existing “bowl” on the property for the building site, snaking an unobtrusive car entry into the natural hollow. “You see a house, but you don’t see a garage,” he points out. Spanning the bowl, the house’s forms curve and loop over each other, climbing in an eccentric spiral. Curving walls of fixed glass reveal interior volumes intertwined as if frozen in sinuous motion. The resulting relationships of solid and void, interior and exterior are difficult to pin down—an effect Schwartz accentuated by looping the structure around a glazed central patio. For most clients, such a conceptual project would be a nonstarter. In this case, says builder Andrew Goldstein, of Thoughtforms Corp., the owners “saw it as a very collaborative, artistic endeavor.” A highly accomplished couple with creative pursuits of their own—he as an amateur blues musician, she as an author—they commissioned sculptors to produce significant environmental works for the property. But the house itself was a piece in whose creation they could participate directly, and their bias was toward aesthetic impact. “They were a very important element in the final product,” Goldstein says. “They pushed the architect to get outside the envelope.” (For more on Thoughtforms Corp., CUSTOM HOME’s 2003 Custom Builder of the Year, click here.)
Details: Earth Work
The “men’s room” of a two-bath master suite,
this space reflects the owners’ vision of a grotto eroded from solid
rock. Brazilian slate rises, in inch-thick courses that suggest
sheetlike geological layers, to form the room’s shower platform, tub
deck, and sink counter. The same material climbs the outside wall, as
slabs that swell here and there to create a shelf or window sill.
Fittings are deliberately simple, inspired by the rudimentary pipe one
might find at a public spring. The shower enclosure consists of a subtly
beveled area of slate floor and a hinged glass panel that contains
spray in the bathing area.
The quantity of stone here is somewhat illusory—every course was
coped to minimize the dead load—but sufficient to require an engineer’s
attention. “Usually you’re not designing weight loads around finishes,”
says Thoughtforms project supervisor Bob Gustin, “but we had to throw
some beams in the structure to carry the slate.”
Schwartz’s office produced a detailed 3-D computer model —a necessity in a building of this complexity—as well as reams of construction drawings. But realizing the building in physical space would be a monumental undertaking, one that required a mathematical mind, a keen ability to visualize abstract forms, and steady nerves. The task fell primarily to Thoughtforms project supervisor Bob Gustin, whose grinning description of the project as “mind-blowingly difficult” makes it sound more like a computer game than a three-year day job. But this game skipped all the easy levels.
