For years, Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang thought about building a vacation house. But the couple, who live in Brooklyn and run an award-winning firm called nArchitects, never seemed to have the time.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, when they were visiting a friend near Rhinebeck, N.Y., that they found themselves with the opportunity. “Much of our work is for agencies, and public buildings, but a lot of that went on hold during the pandemic,” said Mr. Bunge, 57.
Designing a house for themselves would be a chance to realize a personal dream — and one that would keep their employees engaged.
Their friend’s house was on a small lake, so they sat on the dock and opened a laptop to look at available building lots. “We started searching on Zillow, from basically Pennsylvania to Connecticut,” Mr. Bunge said.
After hours of browsing, they suddenly realized the best lot was right in front of them.
“We were like, ‘Wait a minute, there is actually a lot across the lake,’” he said. “The irony was we were looking at what would become our land.”
They bought the eight-acre parcel that September for about $300,000. Then they got to work designing an architecturally inventive house that they hoped would be comfortable for themselves and their children, now 13 and 17.
At their Brooklyn studio, the architects revived a space-planning concept they’d developed for a 10,000-square-foot house in China that was never built. “We took that house and put it on an extreme diet,” said Ms. Hoang, 53.
The result is a two-story, 2,200-square-foot house that feels larger than it is. “The second floor is the shape of a cross,” she said, “so each corner of the ground floor is a small, double-height space.”
Mechanical systems and private spaces like bathrooms are gathered in a central core, leaving the perimeter of the ground floor as open living space. That way, Ms. Hoang said, “the living is really in the round.”
On the ground floor, that perimeter area contains the foyer (where the high ceiling provides space for a miniature basketball net), living room, dining room and kitchen. A vibrant green-painted steel staircase climbs to the second floor past a window that frames a view of the lake. Upstairs, a carpeted landing with a rope-net wall offers a play space and leads to three bedrooms.
The layout isn’t the only innovative thing about the house. The couple also wanted to experiment with new construction methods, so instead of conventional framing and drywall, they used prefabricated cross-laminated timber (or CLT) panels to form the walls and ceilings.
With this form of construction, there are no voids inside the walls to hold electrical wiring, so they put outlets in the concrete floor on the ground level and included a slender channel for wiring underneath the upstairs flooring. Then they transformed the surface-mounted electrical conduit, having it shop-painted a creamy yellow and running it up the walls in artful shapes.
“We call them vines,” Mr. Bunge said, noting that they were inspired by the modernist architect Sigurd Lewerentz, who did something similar in the 1960s in a flower shop in Malmö, Sweden.
The couple initially designed the house with corrugated-metal exterior siding, but when the price of that material skyrocketed amid the pandemic, they replaced it with wavy-edge cedar siding. They’re now happy they were forced to make the change.
“It’s a very old technique,” Ms. Hoang said. “We were really excited about using one of the newest wood construction techniques on the inside — CLT — and one of the oldest on the outside.”
Construction began in January 2022 and was completed in April 2023, at a cost of roughly $1.45 million. Now, as the cedar siding is weathering to a mellow gray, they like it even more, Mr. Bunge said, because “it shows the passage of time.”
Indeed, the whole house functions almost like a clock, he said, as the sun moves around it, illuminating various spaces at different times of days. The mirror-lined round skylights project shifting beams of light across the pine walls.
It’s an ideal place to slow down, catch their breath and appreciate all they’ve accomplished.
“We had this dream for so long,” Mr. Bunge said. Finally, he added, “We said, ‘Let’s just jump into the void and do it.’”
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