Rusty Alexander has been building homes for people all his life, but he has never had a more demanding customer than the one he faced when he started building a contemporary house on the scenic Tennessee River that came to be known as Sweet Home Alabama. You guessed, it, that tough customer was Alexander himself.
“I’ve been here 59 years and I grew up on this piece of ground,” says Alexander, who is the owner of RiverWorks Design Studio. “We couldn’t duplicate this location.”
So when Alexander went to build his Muscle Shoals, Ala., dream home, he was after two seemingly contradictory outcomes: The home had to accentuate the landscape and meld with it at the same time. “Our philosophy was the Frank Lloyd Wright style where it seems to be part of the environment,” he says. “I wanted it to look like it’s been there forever.”
The end result is a $3.5 million, 10,000 square-foot custom home that fully takes advantage of its riverside location while also becoming part of the scenery. But for Alexander, the best feature of the home is how it seamlessly merges the interior with the exterior. “We’re very much outdoors people and we wanted to stay outside as much as we can,” he says.
That desire to be outdoors led Alexander to use design techniques that created the feeling of being outside even when inside. That meant erasing barriers between the home and the environment while using materials indoors and outdoors that visually blur the line between the two.
It starts with the floor-to-ceiling windows that showcase and frame the nearby river. “We didn’t want to block the view or take away from the outside. When you’re in the house, you’re looking right into the water,” Alexander says. “There’s very little art in the house because the art is whatever’s going on outside.”
Prominent use of cable railing on the inside and outside stairs and balconies not only preserved that gorgeous panorama but also gave the home a distinctly contemporary look. “We wanted a clear view from every room of the Tennessee River. And we wanted the railing to disappear as much as possible,” Alexander says. “When you drive up, you can see through the front door over the infinity edge pool and into the river — and it’s just seamless. The railing on the stairwells doesn’t block any of that view.”
In the same way, Alexander wanted the home itself to blend so naturally with its surroundings that it looked as if it were part of the landscape. To accomplish that goal, the same stone from the surrounding river bluffs was used in both the home’s towering stacked ledger vertical walls and horizontal surfaces - inside and out. “It made it look more organic and blend in with the other rock formations we have in the area,” he says.
To further enhance that blending between outside and in, the home features massive motorized multi-track sliding glass doors that disappear into the walls in the kitchen, living room, and master bath. When those doors open, screens automatically drop into place. “So when everything is opened up we don’t have a bug problem,” Alexander says. “Sometimes my wife and I sit around the house and we’re still just amazed at what we did.”
For more on using cable rail indoors and outdoors, visit http://www.feeneyinc.com.
