When families blend, houses must change.  When a couple met and married after having separate families, they realized that their second home in the Berkshires had to be a year-round gathering place for the multiple children and grandchildren that were visiting.  Additionally, the home that received them (a Center Hall Colonial stock plan with a skewed garage connected by the classic breezeway cum kitchen), completely avoided recognition of an extraordinary view of Mount Everett.

Designed to address this view, a new family room/kitchen is stealthily set between the garage and house mass, and allows the existing second floor windows to be maintained by the use of small pitched roof connectors flanking an internalized outside space dubbed “the Zen room”.  


Before

Throughout the addition, the existing fabric of wood floors and sheetrock is woven with the new work’s expressive materiality of log columns, fieldstone fire place, cleft stone steps, natural wood appointments, and wraparound windows.  Extending out from the newly developed rear of the home is a simple and starkly evocative wooden plinth cum terrace that virtually doubles the size of the family room in fair weather.  A new back door and fully optioned mud room/pantry allow for year round use, as does a new full bath.  An open and celebratory kitchen (including sculptural pot rack) is designed to respond to the large scale of the new cathedralized space.

Operable clerestory windows in the monitor roof allow for passive venting and daylighting of a deep space.  Extraordinary insulation, combined with a fine-tuned and high-tech HVAC system, mitigates heating costs. Similarly, a gigantic trellis cum bris soleil shields the large glass view-facing wall from overheating during the summer.  Stone and salvaged tree trunks were indigenous to the area.