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The house was designed on a beautiful site in a wooded area near the Potomac River north of Washington DC. A love for what was already present at the site suggested a house imagined as an architectural continuation of the landscape. The house was designed for a couple in their 80s, but it is actually inhabited by something more complex: the push and pull amongst the members of a three-generation family over which they preside. To ensure the abundant availability of natural lights and the constant presence of scenes from the forest flowing into the interiors, the width of the house’s wings was kept relatively narrow. The main part of the house is formed by two of such wings intersecting to form a kitchen-dining room as the recurrent point of reference for life in the house.
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The house is located on the side of a hill that gently slopes down from south to north and suddenly falls into a rather steep creek. The creek runs through a forest of old oak, beech and maple trees growing amongst a thick bush of rhododendron and American holly. The middle of the site is occupied by a small stone masonry cottage. The cottage has been preserved and incorporated into the plan of the house as a family room where photographs, art and other memorabilia is preserved. In the house, life is marked by the constant presence of landscape scenes that come in through large windows: the creek—sometimes quiet and sometimes turbulent—, a vast filigree of tree branches against the sky and daily visitations of blue heron, fox and deer.
The project conforms to the environmental standards of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, including a detention pond to control rainwater runoff to the adjacent creek. No native plants were removed to build the house and 20 new trees were planted. The grounds are designed to “return to nature” through its recolonization by local plant and animal species. The exterior walls and windows have high insulating value, and the narrow section of the house and large glazed openings result in such a luminous interior that lights are never turned on before dark. Every appliance in the house is electric and the house is heated and cooled with a high-efficiency VRV air-to-air heat pump system. About 40% of the house’s new roofs are covered with solar panels.
The dining room and kitchen are located at the center of the plan as the emotional heart of the house. From this center—spinning away in four directions—the narrow wings that contain the other rooms in the house cut deep into the site, dividing it into four quarters each with its own unique character: the living room and winter garden opening onto a courtyard at the bottom of the hill, the patriarch’s study looking out to the edge of an isolated patch of dense forest, guest bedrooms as if split in two by the midriffs of large tree trunks immediately outside the windows, and a master bedroom that, reached through a long interior bridge, hovers above the creek on tall steel legs. To allow the inclusion of the large surfaces of glass necessary to capture wide views of the landscape in the interiors, the house was built using a system of wood frame construction modified for enhanced lateral rigidity with the introduction of composite resin and wood shear walls. The interiors are simple: painted white walls, wide plank white oak wood floors and an abundance of Persian rugs. The exterior is finished in a gray corrugated steel panel system that was specially designed for the house, it emphasizes length over height in an array of pin-stripe sharp lines of shadow under the sun.
“I love that I get to experience all the seasons in this house. Since I got sick, I stay home all the time, but because I love it here so much, I don’t want to ever leave.”
Obra seeks to develop architectural projects founded on a carefully considered form of design discipline that leads, through research and rational means of construction and fabrication, to an articulation of the unique spatial combinations necessary to enrich and empower inhabitation.
Based in New York City, Obra Architects is led by Pablo Castro FAIA and Jennifer Lee AIA LEED AP. Obra is an international architectural design and planning firm working on projects that create socially sustainable buildings and environments. Its driving force is a diverse team of designers who have converged in the city from all over the world. The firm is actively entrepreneurial and operates to try to advance the way architecture impacts communities and environments: its work pragmatically originates from a realism that harnesses local conditions and the energy of inspired individual clients and institutions seeking change through architecture, design, and urban planning.
