CATEGORY houses
Griffin Island House Design Update – a “floating hole”
One of the most critical design imperatives for a new custom house is that it should be fully integrated with its unique landscape. We are currently collaborating with Kris Horiuchi of Horiuchi Solien Landscape Architects on a new house for a spectacular four acre site on Griffin Island in Wellfleet, MA. The site photos and digital model we posted back on March 19th show a design that takes its formal cues not only directly from Cape Cod Bay but also from the actively shifting, sliding, sandy topography of its dramatic coastal bank. The coastal bank’s movement is almost visible to the naked eye, with sand and trees moving together in dramatic harmony, and our house will also appear to shift and slide with the landscape. One interesting surprise we have proposed to both the owners and Kris is a “floating hole” strategically placed in the middle of the house adjacent to the main entrance as well as main living space, where landscape and building architecture, earth and sky, sun and shade all come together, anchoring house to nature. See below for several building sections that we are developing, as well as additional details of the “hole”. And we’ll keep you posted as we continue to develop the design.
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- Rendered section facing Cape Cod Bay illustrating the relationship between the linear house and the Bay’s horizon, as well as how the new house will be both anchored to the site’s dynamic coastal bank and floating above the horizon.
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- Rendered section through the “floating hole”, facing north / uphill. Three sides of the hole will be glass, and the fourth will have a trellis to support an aromatic, flowering vine. The stone and river rock terrace below the hole will be a perfect shady spot for reading on hot days, with the surrounding native vegetation growing up and essentially into the house.
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- Rendered section through the “floating hole”, facing south towards the main living space with its curving metal roof. Here you can see the operable windows that line three sides of the “floating hole”, which will provide tantalizing views of ground and sky and also help naturally ventilate the entire house during even rainy days.
Before and After: Updating a Staircase
We posted progress photos a few months ago of a small project in Boston’s South End, where we were asked to update a stair connecting an upper level entry hall to a lower level combined living / dining / kitchen. The previous stair was fairly utilitarian, and did nothing to unify the two levels of the house.
We’ve kept the original stair structure, but resurfaced the stair treads with a new and more substantial profile, stained a rich gray/brown to coordinate with the owner’s furniture. The thickened treads are keyed into a white slatted wood wall on the lower level, which conceals doors to storage closets. The slats, in turn, are punctuated with small cutouts backed with LED programmable lighting. The outside wall of the stair is re-surfaced with large-scaled high-gloss panels, which visually connect the two stories with one common element. On the upper level, the entry now feels much larger after we replaced a solid half wall with a glass and stainless steel railing. A new paint scheme makes the entire experience lighter and calmer.
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- BEFORE: Poorly conceived and executed trim details made the original stair an awkward and jarring experience.
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- AFTER: The remodeled stair is light, bright and welcoming, easily unifying the two levels of the home.
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- BEFORE: The existing stair seen from the lower level living room is closed in with a solid plastered parapet.
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- AFTER: The stair is brighter and much more open, with a high gloss paneled back wall leading the eye up to the entry level.
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- BEFORE: The view from the front door shows how an awkward parapet wall obscured any sense of connection to the living spaces below.
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- AFTER: A new glass railing and modern floating panels on the side wall make the two levels feel bigger and better connected.
Westport River House featured on Houzz.com
Houzz is featuring Ruhl Walker’s Westport River House today, in an essay focusing on a design issue we care a lot about, and spend a lot of time and effort on. When designing a custom house, one of the most important design considerations is to recognize solar and wind orientation, views and privacy needs, which of course are not the same on all sides of the building.
You can check out the full portfolio for this project here:
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- The entry side of the house has limited glazing, each window focused on a particular view and enhancing cross ventilation and natural daylighting
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- The river side of the house is virtually all glass, to take full advantage of river and sunset views, as well as to enhance passive solar heat gain in cooler months
Modern Prefab house in Lincoln: Almost Done!
We are a few days away from move-in day at our Lincoln project, so we closed the studio for a few hours and everyone took a pre-Certificate-of-Occupancy look. Yes, there is a bit of a final punch list (as always), and Lincoln’s new Building Inspector brought up a few last minute concerns (also not unexpected), but on this gorgeous spring day, the sun shone gloriously, and we could all imagine the joy we hope our clients will feel once they are fully ensconced in their new home…
Will Ruhl
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- Street façade with living / dining volume on the right, guest bedroom on the far left, and roof deck in the middle.
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- Screened porch with NanaWall bi-folding doors connecting to the living / dining area, and listening room and home office volume above.
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- Street façade with stone steps leading up to 3-story entry / stair hall.
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- Roof deck between main living spaces and bedrooms, and adjacent to kitchen.
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- LR fireplace with honed Botticino surround and spark fire fireplace is detailed to float above the quartersawn red oak floors.
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- Stair screen wall holds up the custom steel stair, and has cutouts to allow light and selective views between the double height living space and stair.
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- Custom steel stair with 2×6 steel channel stringers, flat bar posts, stainless steel cable rails, and quartersawn red oak treads and handrails.
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- Custom steel stair close-up view at landing.
Ruhl Walker Architects featured on Houzz.com
Check out today’s Houzz.com feature article Exterior Materials Mix It Up to see two Ruhl Walker Architects projects featured for its use of mixed exterior materials.
Project portfolios for these projects may also be found here:
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- eBay House
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- Westport River House
We are frequently fortunate enough to have editors interested in our projects, and I always encourage our clients to participate. Writers and photographers want to create flattering impressions of their subjects, and it’s kind of fun to see your self as others may view you thorough the lens of your house. If we as designers have done a good job, you’ll feel very comfortable with the published result!
When my own house was featured this winter in Boston Home magazine, several friends and clients who hadn’t seen our house were surprised that it’s not more like our professional work – in fact it’s not especially modern at all, despite having a few pieces of contemporary furniture and art. The fact is, I like furniture and decorative objects from a variety of periods – things that reflect the purposes and imperatives of their time. If anything, it helps me understand how objects relate to those who created them. But as a creator myself, if you ask me to design something, I can only design in my own time – something new. I like to think my house shows that those are not incompatible thoughts.
Brad Walker
You can check out the Boston Home article on our website at http://tinyurl.com/RWA-Boston-Home
all photos © 2012, Bob O’Connor / Boston Home Magazine
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- Brad Walker, his partner Rodin Shaw Cole, and their Italian Greyhounds in front of a custom bookcase.
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- A console table of Walker’s design grounds a composition of black-and-white drawings and a locally made pitcher.
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- The living room has much of its 1860s architectural detailing intact. A mirror and flanking sconces from the 1820s would be something the original owner might have had. The large graphic is a reproduction of Nolli’s famous architectural map of Rome.
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- Because the small kitchen is open to the living room, we chose base cabinets, a toe kick and flooring all of the same material. The result blurs the peripheral “horizon line” making the spaces feel larger.
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- Black slate at the kitchen backsplash is an update of the 70s “exposed brick” look. The counters are a compatible matte finish granite.
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- This bookshelf was also customized to house a few folio books horizontally as well as an edited collection of drawings and objects.
Design update: Griffin Island House in Wellfleet
We are really excited about a new beach house we are designing for a magnificent waterfront property on Cape Cod Bay in Wellfleet. On Monday I had the pleasure of spending a full day with our clients, basking in the 70 degree sunshine and exploring the four acre site from end to end with three phenomenally talented prospective landscape architects. We discussed ways to integrate the design of house and land, as well as opportunities for enhancing the diverse site features — hilly and thick with gnarled pines on one side, more open and low-scaled with beach plum, bayberry, and beach grasses on the other. We can’t wait to start collaborating with the landscape design team and seeing how things develop. Yes, we’ll keep you posted.
Will Ruhl
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- Looking north towards the high point of the coastal bank, into a bayberry clearing where we plan to insert the new house. Given the complexities of building on sand, we no doubt will have to move and / or remove some trees, but the goal in the end will be to have the woods grow back up tight to the house on the inland side, and for the bayberry, beach plums, and beach grasses to grow up tight to the house on the Bay side.
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- The new master suite (including a huge, skylit and windowed shower) will have this stunning view along the coastal bank, with the inner Cape visible along the horizon. The site has an existing house high on the bank, but it is in terrible disrepair and threatened by erosion and sand inundation; it will be removed and its site will be re-naturalized. The new house will be much more discreet in terms of its siting, built as gently as possible into the hill rather than dominating the site.
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- The inland side of the house is composed of shifting and curving volumes, appearing almost to be sliding off of the coastal bank which extends up and to the right in this digital image. At right is the main house and on the left is a small art studio with open air storage below; a raised deck bridges the gap between the two, and leads to paths to the beach.
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- On the Bay side, the house is virtually all glass, with an asymmetrically curved planar roof capping the living /dining / screened porch volume. Materials are currently proposed as cedar shingles and horizontal siding with copper at the curved roof, fireplace surround, and bathrooms.
Sustainable design; IKEA granite
Designing sustainably has never been an appealing fad as far as we have been concerned, nor is it even really a separate mission for us; it has always simply been the right thing to do. One recently completed Ruhl Walker project – our Mystic Lake House – has received some press for Matthew Cunningham’s sustainable landscape design: Paula Bodah blogged about our use of reclaimed granite from Somerville’s IKEA construction site in New England Home Magazine Blog today, and Matthew’s own blog has some additional information, as well as great photos. After such a mild winter (…knock on wood…), spring will no doubt bring added drama to this extraordinary landscape, and we can’t wait to share that with you!
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- Granite slabs sit on an IKEA construction site in Somerville waiting to be carted off to a landfill.
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- But we had better plans, and now hundreds of granite slabs have been repurposed in Arlington.
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- In the front yard, granite slabs were laid flat for a new entry walkway, with moss carefully placed within the joints
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- In the back yard, granite curbs were inserted into the lawn to define a terrace and to create steps leading down to the lake.
Construction Update: Lincoln Custom Prefab House
The custom prefab house we designed in Lincoln is nearing completion, and the owners are getting excited about moving out of their temporary apartment and into their new, sun-filled dream house! The cedar tongue and groove siding looks fantastic; it has a temporary protective coating and will be stained in the spring after studying some color options. There is a lot of frantic activity inside also, with the quarter sawn red oak flooring being finished this week, tile and trim almost complete, the stainless steel cable railings being installed, and the Pedini kitchen getting final adjustments.
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- The new house as seen from the street. The main living spaces are within the cube on the right, and bedrooms are on the left.
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- Looking up from the garage to the new front door and three-story stair hall beyond. In the middle is a sun-filled roof deck.
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- View of the west end of the house, with master bedroom in the left volume and guest bedroom in the right volume, separated by a narrow corridor.
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- The north and east sides of the house include a large screened porch, with home office and listening room above.
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- The new open riser steel stair, awaiting its stainless steel cable guard rail and quarter sawn red oak treads.
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- Between the double height living room and stair is a floating planar wall with openings cut in to allow views and light to pass through.
Construction Update: Modern Suburban Transformation
Last week we posted images of recent progress on our transformation of a speculatively-built house in suburban Boston, and this week we have windows to show off, adding a dose of scale and reality. Perhaps not as dramatic as when an entire custom prefab house is set in two or three days, like our Lincoln house, but the rainy weather we’ve been having is less potentially destructive with site-built structures than it can be with custom prefab modular. It’s fun to see the new spaces coming together, especially the new living spaces that hover over the basement level excavation, and the new master suite.
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- The remnants of the original “Garrison Colonial” are still visible from the street, with the central portion subtracted in order to create a two-story stair hall and to articulate two upstairs bedrooms. A new living room extends off to the left, and the new master suite is visible beyond.
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- The new cubic forms housing the new living space and upstairs master suite hover above what will eventually become a landscaped basement level outside living space, which will have a built-in fire pit and seating.
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- View of the new living / dining space.
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- The new master suite’s expansive views.
