American Beauty (Wallpaper)
Published December 2007
It can be hard to stand out on Martha's Vineyard. Overstatement – exemplified by, for instance, Larry David's 70-acre spread complete with stainless steel outdoor kitchen—is one way to go about making a dent on this most old-school deluxe getaway for the Eastern Seaboard's elite. The other, and better, is to understate, understate, understate.
Architecture Research Office, a Manhattan-based architecture firm, recently completed a sublimely understated house for a retired rabbi and an art and design curator. The couple, who commissioned ARO five years ago, have owned the site, in the town of Chilmark, since the mid-nineteen-seventies. Their previous house, a single water-focused band designed by local architect Richard Henderson, was just fine for the last thirty years but, with a decrease in commitments –the rabbi just retired – the couple found themselves with an increase in interest in, as it's locally known, the Island.
When the couple first approached ARO in 1999 the firm was just too busy. The success of their Times Square recruiting station – a one-note duck of a fluorescent flag of a building on a busy Manhattan traffic island – had thrown ARO into a whirlwind of commissions and projects, ones that didn't allow time for such a (relatively) small and (still relatively) low-budget residence. A few years went by, though, and as with all things, the flux of time and pressures of space changed, and Adam Yarinsky, principal and co-founder of the firm, was free.
The clients were interested in re-introducing a landscape element—something that had been overlooked with all the attention focused onto the admittedly spectacular water view-- into the site, and one of the first things a visitor notices is the front courtyard garden, designed in very close collaboration with Maine-based landscape architect Michael Boucher. Low stone walls, the rock chosen after months of Vineyard research, creates a level of delineation that reiterates what is the house's main architectural detail – a series of wood walls constructed out of specially manufactured tongue-in-groove siding.
The walls jut out from inside and sweep in from outside, and it's an interrelationship between private and very private that continues through the entire house. Yarinsky points to a series of study models all based around the client's needs – three bedrooms that could also be used as studies; an open and convivial kitchen; flexibility of space; and lots and lots of light – that figure and reconfigure basic blocks into a series of meandering rooms. The final plan locks three similar spaces together in a criss-cross pattern that allows, on a summer day, six people –including a baby!-- to comfortably inhabit the space without stepping on each other.
The inside-outside play is more considered than it looks, Yarinsky says. Because part of the brief was to create a house that was entirely winter-ready, ARO had to figure out a way to maintain the integrity of the inside without compromising the relationship to the outside. A wall of German-designed (that's code for simple-ultra-high-tech) windowed doors faces the water and opens up onto a deck shielded from the harsh New England wind by an extension of the living room wall.
"You want this kind of generosity of space and openness," Yarinsky says of the project. "But everything has to be carefully considered and controlled." The architects went through six iterations of the wall design, each version of which played with ideas of shadow and the interplay between sunshine and darkness, summer and winter, and, again, inside and out. It's a subtle intervention, though, and it's this subtlety that Yarinsky – and the clients – find most appealing about the project and its scale.
"What was really wonderful and refreshing about working on this site is that it's a normal house; it's not bloated," Yarinsky says. The clients wanted the house to be a third bigger than it is but ARO –and the impending threat of higher construction costs – managed to talk them down. Still, at 2500 feet, it's a good size, one that feels twice as big thanks to the open airiness of it all.
The walls are Alaskan cedar, the floor unstained white oak, the stone details all the Italian lava basaltina, hand-installed by a flown-in mason. Vertical zinc walls round out the purposefully limited material palette, and three faceted skylights introduce both all-important daylight and a moment of surprising detail.
It's this element of subtle surprise that runs through the entire house, and through the design. Yarinsky mentions the control architects necessarily have, but mitigates that often treacherous moment of "I want you to feel this" with a realization that these interventions had to be subtle. "I don't think it's appropriate to live in a statement on that scale," he says of domestic architecture.
Instead, "the character of the house is developed through the qualities of the people that live here," Yarinsky says, and it's clear that this is a place designed for both contemplative spirituality and historically-informed art and design. This house, with its quietly perfect moments like a bedroom skylight and impeccable sense of proportion, is an argument in favor of simplicity and understatement. It might look quiet, but it speaks, and says a lot.
