The Downs Creek Guest House is located on a beautiful, wooded site with several creeks that establish the edges of the site and create a forested retreat just minutes away from downtown Athens, GA. The largest of the creeks, Barber Creek forms the northern edge of the property and creates both limitations and opportunities for the guest house.
Barber Creek’s critical riparian buffers and 100-year flood plain shaped the essence of the project, emphasized the precise site selection, and influenced all the design decisions. The guest house was delicately nestled into an existing tree canopy to avoid impacting the beautiful mature hardwoods. The carefully placed building footprint along the steep topography minimized site disturbance within this area’s valuable watershed. This precise building placement balanced the cut and fill so that the structure appears to have grown from the site. The architecture of the guest house reflects the forms, details, and regional qualities of the surrounding landscape.
The ecological context influenced the selection of a palette of materials and colors that best reflect the environment of the building site. The natural setting provided the cues for both interior and exterior finish selections. The dark stained cypress siding runs vertically to harmonize with the dense hardwood forest. The locally harvested poplar ceiling at the underside of the shed roof line runs continuously from the exterior into the interior, drawing the forest into the space through a large expanse of windows deliberately placed at the corner of a double height volume to maximizes the views of Downs Creek. The lines between the interior of the guest house and exterior environment are blurred providing a constant reminder of this breathtaking natural context.
Leveraging the context, the form was intentionally designed to be basic, a perfect 26’ x 26’ square with the simplest roof style found in the southern vernacular—a low-sloped shed roof. The primary entrance is a narrow open grate bridge that negotiates the site topography while providing complete visual openness for a dramatic entrance. The bridge entrance does not block daylight or water flow from reaching the landscape below and allows the natural landscape unimpeded interaction with the building’s edges. The house’s small footprint reduces further at the lowest level where the guest suite is located and offers walkout access to the forest floor and Downs Creek. This small retreat is anything but basic—it leverages simple forms and natural materials pallets to emphasize the importance of its natural context and fully embrace the concept of biophilic design.
Photo credits: Photos courtesy of Kristen Karch
