The goal of the design was to maintain the historic integrity of the existing 1840s farmhouse and its interior spaces while juxtaposing it against more open, light-filled spaces in the modern addition.
The program included a new great room area with small kitchen and bar for entertaining and a sleeping loft to serve as a new master suite, freeing the bedrooms in the existing portion of the home for visiting family. Our approach to the design of the addition was to step the massing back from the front facade of the historical home in to allow the existing structure to remain most prominent. The addition touches the existing house lightly by narrowing to a corten steel-clad hyphen housing a dining area for the great room and tying into the 1-story, low-slope existing roof along the back of the home. It then expands to a 1-1/2 story simple cross-gable evoking a minimalist farmhouse vernacular, deferential to its historical parent but unabashedly promoting the honesty of having been constructed in a more contemporary era.
The walnut bar, white oak flooring and built-ins, and the exterior cedar siding were all sourced from trees felled on the property.
