Berkshires House VI
Photos by Michael Lavin Flower
An adventurous pair of houses with an interesting dynamic. The clients are brothers, both avid fans of New England industrial architecture, the grittier the better, who asked us to design two houses for their young families on two separate sites. It soon became apparent that their ideas of what it meant to transform industrial into domestic were polar opposites.
This brother wished for an unarticulated Butler-like building, inscrutable from the street, and repetitive like the wooden mills on Maine’s Pompanoosac River, but with a varied and dynamic interior. Multiple projects were always underway in this household, and they wanted the mess to be an exciting feature of the house, not a constant source of stress. Bridges and overlooks, even in the porch, contribute to the anarchy. We used corrugated steel in short lengths so the seams would show and contribute to the overall gritty feeling.