CATEGORY waterfront
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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
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:
-
- The entry side of the house has limited glazing, each window focused on a particular view and enhancing cross ventilation and natural daylighting
-
- 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
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
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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!
-
- Granite slabs sit on an IKEA construction site in Somerville waiting to be carted off to a landfill.
-
- But we had better plans, and now hundreds of granite slabs have been repurposed in Arlington.
-
- In the front yard, granite slabs were laid flat for a new entry walkway, with moss carefully placed within the joints
-
- In the back yard, granite curbs were inserted into the lawn to define a terrace and to create steps leading down to the lake.
New designs at Ruhl Walker Architects’ studio
We are really excited about several new projects in the early stages of design, including new houses, two new lofts, and a master plan for a small school in northern New Hampshire. We will share some more information about each of these projects in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, check out the images and information below.
-
- One of several potential conceptual designs for a new house built on an enormous, shifting coastal bank on the outer reaches of Cape Cod, this view shows the house on the water side. The main living space is elevated above the ground, under an asymmetrically curved roof, to enhance views and natural ventilation.
-
- The inland side of the same Cape beach house is more introspective, with smaller windows in a collage of overlapping and sliding curved planes and volumes. The main house is to the right and an art studio is to the left, connected by a deck / bridge.
-
- We are also in the very early stages of design for a new house designed for a wooded site on Martha’s Vineyard, for wonderful clients we have known for over 20 years.
-
- An early proposal for the Vineyard house illustrates our effort to design a house that appears to almost melt into the land, not unlike the stone farmers’ walls that snake through the woods.
-
- A conceptual site model for five small houses built into a hill on Cape Cod. In the upper right corner is the client’s existing glass and steel house; each new house is to have a green roof so that the view down from the main house is of a modern sculptural landscape, not just a collection of roofs.
-
- The conceptual site plan shows how the houses hug close to one setback line to allow for each house to have surprisingly large side yards that can be designed to open to the dramatic views as well as capture ocean breezes.
-
- This conceptual digital model shows material and formal ideas for the redesign of a penthouse at the W hotel condominiums in Boston. The unit will have a new steel and glass stair to a roof deck, and boasts 270 degree views stretching from the Harbor Islands to the Charles River and Cambridge beyond.
-
- The proposed new kitchen for the W unit.
-
- We’ve just started redesigning two lofts at the Channel Center in Boston, both units that we happen to have designed for previous owners several years ago. This photo shows an intermediate owner’s idea of appropriate loft décor — not exactly our cup of tea! — and a subsequent owner ripped out the polycarbonate and steel sliding doors and built full height plastered walls, crown mouldings, and a plastic raised panel door around the custom steel, fir, and acid etched glass shelving…
-
- The existing heavy timber beams and columns in the Channel Center have steel column caps that are open in the middle to allow for steel tension rods to pass through them; a very cool industrial detail.
-
- We have also been working on a master plan for The White Mountain School in Bethlehem, NH. The plan includes renovations and energy enhancement improvements to all existing buildings, converting underutilized older buildings into staff housing, bringing the original Frederic Law Olmstead landscaping back to its original glory, bringing the 1960’s vintage main administrative / classroom building into the 21st century, and adding a new theater / gathering space and arts classrooms, a 16-bed dorm addition with two faculty apartments, and a new 28-bed dorm with 3 staff apartments. Clearly this ambitious plan will take many years to realize.
-
- Most of the administrative, classroom, and gathering spaces are within a rambling main building. Much of the building was rebuilt in the early 1960’s after a devastating fire destroyed most of the original structure, which had been a private estate prior to being donated to the school. The plans above show preliminary thoughts on how to add a new entrance that includes an elevator and other accessibility improvements, new art classrooms with a green roof, a new theater, converting underutilized ground floor space to a fully accessible infirmary, and converting the former upstairs infirmary into staff housing.
Architectural Regionalism and Modern House Design
A December 30, 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal‘s Friday Journal focused on architectural regionalism and its reemergence in house design. After decades in which well known architects designed houses that could be seen as idiosyncratic homages to their previous artistic preoccupations and that paid little attention to local climatic realities, architects (and their clients!) are once again finding joy and artistic inspiration in the house’s local surroundings and reinterpreting local traditions in fresh, inventive ways. We can only hope that this catches on with mass production and speculative house builders, which represents the vast majority of our country’s new housing stock…
Here are a few examples from our own portfolio that express our preoccupation with important regional architectural issues.
-
- A house on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, designed by Rhoady Lee Architecture in collaboration with Ruhl Walker, has deep roof overhangs to protect the house from too much solar heat gain, and takes advantage of local trade winds with its expansive lanais. All wood is locally sourced, as are the lava rock walls. Credit: Rhoady Lee Architecture
-
- In New England, as in this Ruhl Walker house in Westport, MA, we also need to protect our houses from harsh summer sun with roof overhangs, but they need to be designed to also allow for abundant winter sunlight to enter the house to passively warm the house. Windows can be opened to allow for ample natural ventilation, but most windows are fixed in place to maximize energy efficiency (and views, which aren’t marred by window screens!).
-
- In the Big Island House, enormous walls of glass (detailed by Ruhl Walker’s Sandra Baron and Lilly Smith) mechanically slide out of the way to open the house up to the cool ocean breezes, and to allow for uninterrupted access to the house’s lushly landscaped grounds. Credit: Rhoady Lee Architecture
-
- In our Westport house, we have a more transitional connection between inside and outside, with the main living space opening up to a large screened living space, which in turn opens to a raised deck, then down wide steps (wide enough for sitting as well as carrying trays of drinks!) to the yard and ultimately the Westport River. Alas, we have mosquitoes, green flies, rain, and snow!
Blurring inside and outside with opening walls!
Having worked on several cool projects in Hawai‘i over the last few years, our eyes have really been opened to architectural possibilities that rarely exist in New England. For example, we collaborated with Rhoady Lee Architecture and Design on the Big Island on a new house near the Four Seasons at Hualalai that had custom motorized rolling walls of glass and teak (detailed by our own Sandra Baron and Lilly Smith!) that disappear into lava rock walls, opening virtually every room in the house to trellised lanais, an edge-less pool, lushly landscaped courtyards, and sweet tropical breezes. So, how can we introduce these exotic possibilities to the custom houses we design in New England?
One answer is through bi-folding glass walls from companies like Nanawall, and we’ve designed several recent houses that utilize their exceptional technology. Our clients wanted to have large screened porches so they could live outdoors spring, summer and fall without the ubiquitous New England mosquitoes and flies, and wondered how they might join those porches to the rest of the house. Voila, we proposed Nanawall doors and something that has traditionally been a barrier in older New England houses becomes an opportunity. Added benefit: makes a great party house even better!
-
- This bi-folding wall of glass and aluminum slides easily to the left, opening up the living/dining space to a large screen porch. Photo: Peter Vanderwarker
-
- Compared to conventional sliding glass doors, bi-folding wall openings can be much wider within the same unit width. Photo: Peter Vanderwarker
-
- Living / dining and screen porch become one; ready to entertain! Photo: Peter Vanderwarker
-
- Who would want to interrupt views like this with conventional doors?! Photo: Peter Vanderwarker
-
- A twenty-one foot wide Nanawall system for a house under construction in Lincoln, MA; this spring the happy homeowners will be able to combine their living space seamlessly to their new screen porch.
-
- A view of the bi-folding wall from the exterior, showing the factory-finished aluminum clad finish on the exterior, while the interior is natural wood; so many options!
Modern Hawaiian Lanais (part II, hotels)
After a very long, exhausting day flying from Boston to the Big Island of Hawai‘i, and after a bizarre drive across seemingly endless miles of lava – usually at night with little sense of scale – harried visitors are often welcomed by a warm “aloha”, friendly faces, cool towels, fresh guava juice, and hotels unlike anything most of us have seen before. Who knew that hotels didn’t really need walls? As with Hawaiian houses, the main public spaces of most Hawaiian hotels are essentially large open air lanais; no screens as you would find in the Caribbean since flying insects are less prevalent in Hawai‘i, and it is rare to see the discrete bi-folding shutters or sliding skylights closed. The next morning you wake up, and you see views like those below. Pure heaven! And fresh ideas for how these design possibilities might translate into our own work on custom vacation houses in New England…
Credits:
Mauna Kea Beach Resort: Mauna Kea Beach Hotel
Four Seasons Hualalai: Four Seasons Resort At Hualalai
-
- One of William Ruhl’s (principal of Ruhl Walker Architects) favorite hotels on the Big Island is the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, designed by SOM and completed in 1965. All of the public spaces are cooled naturally by being designed without walls, taking advantage of the trade winds and natural convection, and allowing uninterrupted views of the magnificent coastline.
-
- One of Mauna Kea’s open air restaurants, Manta, overlooking Kauna‘oa Beach, one of Hawaii’s most breath-taking beaches. And yes, you do occasionally run into manta rays as you snorkel, and during dinner.
-
- The inversely-stepped profile of the Mauna Kea’s main lobby enhances the natural cooling of the space, with cool breezes flowing freely and warm air disappearing through the roof openings.
-
- The main stair of the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, looking down to its spectacular beach and crystal clear waters. Photo credit: Jeff Green
-
- Another favorite hotel on the Big Island is the Four Seasons Hualalai. As with many other Hawaiian hotels, all public spaces are open air, with bi-folding screen and/or glass panels providing protection during the occasional inclement weather. Above and to the right is Pahu i‘a restaurant, directly on the beach. Just magnificent…
-
- Without walls, views are infinite and fresh air is abundant.
-
- The Four Season’s lobby is a separate pavilion (“hale” in Hawaiian) which is essentially open to the elements but does have sliding and bi-folding glass doors in case of (rare) inclement weather.
-
- You have to look pretty hard to see the glass and mahogany doors in the main lobby (lanai) of the Four Seasons. Furnishings are perhaps a bit too faux-historic, but sure are comfortable…
Modern Hawaiian Lanais (Part I, houses)
Having just returned from the Big Island of Hawai‘i – the first time in five years not related at least partially to working with the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center – I still have Hawai‘i on my mind… It doesn’t help that the temperatures dipped into single digits this weekend, with wind chills below zero!
Architects have a hard time traveling without focusing obsessively on local architecture, and Hawaii’s – the openness to the elements, the blurring of inside and outside, the direct link to Asian architecture in both form and spatial flow – is particularly alluring. One key element is the “lanai”, a term first used in Hawai‘i in the early eighteenth century, and elsewhere known generically as a porch or veranda. The Hawaiian Islands are well known for their steady tropical breezes, a benefit and sometimes curse of being located so remotely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaiian lanais are often a house’s primary living space, and provide much needed shade and help Hawaiian buildings breathe by catching the trade winds and using that constant supply of fresh, naturally cooled (by the Pacific) air to remove hotter, more stagnant air. Below are a few of my favorite examples of modern lanais.
Send us your own images and thoughts! And look forward to future posts showing how we bring this “exotic” knowledge to our New England projects!
Credits:
Belzberg Architects, Santa Monica, CA: Belzberg Architects
Olson Kundig Architects, Seattle, WA: Olson Kundig Architects
Craig Steeley Architecture, San Francisco, CA: Craig Steely Architecture
Legoretta + Legoretta, Mexico: Legorreta + Legorreta
-
- An abstract, open air entry lanai at a house designed by Belzberg Architects; with less than 10” of precipitation a year, shade is more critical than protection from rain.
-
- Deep roof overhangs and a raised infinity-edged pool help keep this lanai cool. Credit: Belzberg Architects
-
- This lanai is defined by two stone and glass walls and a narrow lap pool; the walls are tall enough to provide ample shade, and the shape of the space helps funnel fresh air through. Credit: Belzberg Architects
-
- Opposite view of the same lanai shown on the left; note the lanai’s modern “trellis” ceiling, which helps create shade while also allowing warm air to escape between the wood beams. Credit: Belzberg Architects
-
- A house on the Big Island of Hawaii designed by Olson Kundig Architects. Its primary lanai is located between the main living space and guest suites.
-
- View of the lanai, which flows into the main living space. Credit: Olson Kundig Archtiects
-
- This house, designed by Craig Steeley Architecture, has a screened lanai on the upper floor.
-
- Inside Steeley’s screened lanai; note the floor boards, which are held apart to enhance natural ventilation.
-
- Another house by Craig Steeley Architecture, with the open air lanai separating the main house and a separate studio.
-
- The ceiling of this lanai is raised slightly to allow warmer air to rise up through the gap and be replaced by cooler, fresh air brought by the trade winds. Yes, that is lava…
-
- A house by Ricardo Legoretta on the Kohala Coast of Hawaii. The continuous lanai protects the house from intense western sunlight and allows ever space to flow freely towards the ocean terraces.
-
- Legoretta’s lanai utilizes a small salt water plunge pool to help keep the space cool, the steady sea breezes being cooled as they blow across the water.
Just as construction of our Mystic Lake house was winding down, the neighbor’s house was demolished and construction began on their own new house; what goes around, comes around! And soon winter will have to arrive presumably; other than an odd snowfall around Halloween we’ve escaped so far. So, we will have to wait to do a full (professional) photo shoot until spring. In the meantime, our client shared the lovely photos below.
-
- The house settles into its lake-side site, a collage of discrete volumes stepping down to the steeply sloping lawn.
-
- The glassy living room volume seen from the lake.
-
- The house is built close to the street to maximize the size of the yard on the lake side; by spring we should start seeing the re-naturalized landscaping designed by Matthew Cunningham.
-
- With time, the front yard will grow up to screen much of the front of the house, merging house and landscape. You can see additional information on Matthew’s design in our August 30, 2011 blog post.
-
- The cantilevered living room volume hovers above the lake-side yard. We wanted to keep the footprint of the lower level as small as possible, hence the cantilevered volumes of the main living spaces; this also helps reduce and control the scale of the house on the lake side, which would otherwise have felt too massive.
-
- The glassy living room volume is on the left, and the home office and master bedroom roof deck are within the smaller volume on the right; between these is the main deck, with wide steps leading down to the yard and a lower terrace.
-
- The five foot wide steps lead down to a lower terrace with hot tub, and to granite steps set into the hill that lead down to the lake.
-
- The glassy living room cube hovers above Mystic Lake. From inside you really feel like you are floating on the lake.
