Design in Mind

(peaceful music) (bright music) - Residential architecture may be more so than a lot of other kinds of architecture is so personal.

The ultimate goal is to give your client a house that has a sense of place.

There's your site.

You want the house to have a sense of inevitability about how it sits on the land.

You want it to feel like it had always been there.

You also want it to feel like it belongs in the larger context in which it's set to understand the architectural traditions of a given place.

Memory is something that I think comes out when you start to work with a client.

I had such powerful childhood experiences of places and architecture, and I think that's true for a lot of people that buildings from their past resonate with them and it's important for us to pay attention to that and then to find ways to manifest it.

(bright music) I am Gil Schafer.

My firm is called G.P.

Schafer Architect.

Our work is rooted in classical and vernacular traditions of American architecture.

We've been in an office in Soho for, I don't know probably 15 years and we grew out of it and so we tried to find a space that was in a neighborhood that felt like a neighborhood.

This space has this great overlook onto Union Square sort of right at the treetops.

It's a wonderful place to be because the scale of this part of town is very human scaled, it's very walkable and it's in Greenwich Village, which I've always loved.

I lived in the village for many years.

It's a kind of microcosm of New York.

I think architects, when they make their own space they want to obviously express something about the work that they do so I thought it was important to create at least in part of this space, an environment that clients could relate to as being somewhat domestic.

There's a sense of proportion and scale and architectural detail, making it feel tailored, the way our work is.

The back of the office really needs to be very functional and organized around all the different studios and then running right down the middle of it like a spine is our library, which is sort of the backbone of literally and figuratively of what we do.

When you're in architecture school, you're kind of led to believe that you do it all on your own.

You know, it's that myth of the sort of hero architect, the lone genius, which of course is not at all true, right?

It takes many, many people to create a building and that's what's so kind of funny about The Fountainhead, you know, where there's this heroic character who designs these buildings all by himself, his drafting table.

Nobody is really Howard Roark.

I think it's so important to surround yourself with the most talented people that you can.

When you start with a new client, you work up a program, as you call it, for their house, how many rooms, what kinds of rooms, when are you gonna use the house?

How does their family live?

And then you draw very schematic, conceptual drawings about how the different rooms relate to one another.

The team will come and we'll review all of this material looking at both historic precedent because pretty much everything we do has some foundation and historic precedent and then how we are adapting that to the rooms and spaces that we are creating.

We look at a lot of options and then you begin to turn that gradually into architecture.

(bright music) From a very young age, I was always building things.

I was definitely a kid very much wired to being an architect.

I had a somewhat peripatetic childhood.

I spent a lot of time on a farm in a rural part of New Jersey, but my parents divorced when I was young and my dad moved into New York City.

We also moved out to Southern California and lived in this crazy beach shack on the coast just south of Santa Barbara.

And we had this house with this wacky glass garage door that would kind of roll up onto the ceiling and open up the whole room to the beach.

We even lived for a time in The Bahamas and I had a grandmother who had this house in southern Georgia and it was actually painted pink and I think that's where I got a sense that houses didn't need to be opulent to be elegant.

I think it gave me a sense of how you live differently in different places and the kind of architecture that you find in each of those places.

I also had a grandfather, actually my namesake who was an architect.

He had a fairly large firm in Cleveland, Ohio, and he himself was the grandson of an architect and then I had parents who were always building things.

There was always some sort of building project going on when I was growing up.

I have a kind of almost Proustian reaction to the smell of timber studs and and fresh paint.

So I think I was set very early on a track to being an architect.

It probably was inevitable.

After college where I really focused on architectural history, I went into architecture school and when I got to Yale at that time, which was the mid 80s, I quickly learned that not all of that was thought of as architecture.

I get to one of my very first reviews.

I had done this what I thought was somewhat modern but nevertheless symmetrical facade.

The critic got up and looked at my project and he said, what is this symmetry?

Why is this symmetrical?

Symmetry is for dogs, this project is for dogs.

And it was incredibly shocking 'cause I hadn't really realized that architecture would be so limited or so defined.

I loved my time at Yale.

I got an amazing education but it wasn't really an education in things that are very much central to my work now.

In my last semester, I was lucky to place into a studio with an architect named Bernard Tschumi, who was connected to a group of what they call Deconstructivist architects.

His philosophy of architecture was that life was chaotic full of accidents and happenstance and that architecture could and should relate to that somehow and maybe even express that and celebrate it.

He was an up and coming star architect at the time and it was very exciting to get into his studio.

At the end of it, he asked me and another guy from my class to come work for him in New York.

I fairly quickly realized that this was the kind of architecture.

While it was really interesting, my soul wasn't in it and I needed to switch gears completely.

I remember seeing a cover story, an architectural digest of this brand new house that was built in Palm Beach with Bonnie Williams as the designer and Mark Ferguson as the architect.

I thought, oh my god, the I want to go work for these people because they're just trying to do something that really looks at history but makes a building that's livable now.

Ferguson Murray & Shamamian was a wonderful place to be.

It's where I got my second advanced degree I think in architecture, in the sense of learning finally about classicism and then later a landscape designer a friend of mine named Deborah Nevins came to me and she said, I'm doing a vegetable garden and they want to build a potting shed.

So I started my practice doing the most simple building which was a sort of 15 foot by 20 foot potting shed and then a very small guest cottage up in Sharon, Connecticut, and then my own house which I had just started to design.

I've always been interested in historic buildings and I found when I built my own house where I was trying to find an old house to live in and then couldn't, and so built one as best I could that had the feeling of an old house, I've discovered that that really resonated with people.

I thought, well, can we retain some of the authenticity and essence of those historic houses but make it work for the way you wanna live now?

And I think that's what we really work on every day in my practice.

(peaceful music) I've known this part of New York for more than 40 years.

I went to high school up here and then about 20 years ago built a house for myself not too far from where we're standing in the northern part of Dutchess County.

And so I was very excited when a couple contacted me a few years ago to design a new house for them on some farmland that they bought up here.

The property is made up of several farm fields that string together and rise up a hillside and I think what attracted them to it is that it's very much like the English countryside with the rolling fields, hedgerows, old stonewalls.

It has a wonderfully romantic quality.

My clients are an American couple but they had lived in England for a number of years so they were looking to build a weekend house that would eventually become their full-time residence.

Farmland is an interesting and challenging site for a new house because there's a lot of openness and usually not something that's going to anchor the house into the land.

The clients had spent time on the land before we first met, they were really keen to build on the top of the property and so we walked up that steep hill to the top with Debbie Nevins, the landscape designer and there is a spectacular view, but she immediately said you can't build the house here.

In addition to the fact that there would be no sort of level land on which to set a house and create a kind of precinct for it, the driveway up there would've been tremendously difficult to build.

And so instead we thought it would sit much more comfortably lower down on the slope.

And what was interesting to me about that was that there was also this wonderful stand of trees and that had a kind of sense of place that I always look for.

(bright music) Because the clients had this really strong sense of what English country houses looked and felt like, they'd actually lived in one, that immediately gave me some ideas about what it could be stylistically rooted in the 18th century, early 19th century Georgian Palladian traditions of the English country house and we settled on something that was very centered, very formal and symmetrical.

A lot of these houses in England are made of stone, cut stone, and I felt like that was going to be much too formal for this environment, and so that led me to think about a local fieldstone because it would have some of the tonality of the land here.

Also, houses that are cubic can easily have very plain exterior walls so we wanted to create some undulation in the surfaces of the wall to create visual interest and hierarchy.

There's a tremendous tradition of 19th century architecture in the Hudson Valley, much of it Greek revival but also gothic revival, and that extends from very elaborate houses that overlook the Hudson to much more vernacular farmhouses that you find where we are which is about 45 minutes from the Hudson River.

I thought it would be interesting to try and weave some of that character into this design.

And so the portico is a Greek doric entry portico.

There's a Greek key detail on the tablature freeze that actually allows for venting for the HVAC systems in the house.

All of our molding shapes like the pilasters on the bay windows or the pilasters in the south facade they're really Grecian rather than Roman Georgian classical, all which seemed to me very appropriate for this place.

(bright music) Once we settled on the idea that we needed to move the site of the house farther down the meadow, we still had the issue of the slope to contend with.

We then created a courtyard on this north side of the house anchored by four sycamore trees, these two garden pavilions that would actually hold back the hillside, hedges of clipped horn beam to connect the two pavilions and long grass steps gently rising up from the courtyard to a small lawn terrace with a bench that overlooks the court flanked by two mulberry trees.

So it creates a distinction between the more formal courtyard and the wilder farm meadow, but at the same time reconnects it to that landscape Because of the way we were essentially terracing the land now, the lawn on the south side of the house is actually raised above the meadow below it and it creates a kind of stone plinth on which the house and its surrounding gardens sit.

English country houses often did this and they called it a ha-ha.

From the downhill side it's a kind of wall so that sheep or cattle couldn't actually walk up to the lawn in front of the house and it's invisible from the uphill side.

On the west side of the house, Debbie created this hemicycle hedge that completely obscures your view of the driveway and creates this wonderful space.

And then on the east side, there's a pergola that overlooks the big meadows and is a wonderful place to sit and eat.

What is fun about making an architecture like this that has these different outbuildings, garden walls and discreet garden spaces is that it creates a little bit of mystery and adventure and that's particularly fun if you're a kid.

I know from my own experiences visiting my grandmother's house and wandering in her gardens and getting on my bike and discovering things just over the hill or around the corner that's a wonderful basis for creating memories, and that was was something that I thought was really fun here.

(bell ringing) The doorbell is another thing that's very English and another way that we tried to tie our work into the lives of the people who live here.

In the end, a house like this looks quite formal, and of course the models that we base the architecture on are very formal.

The beauty of this project is that the clients have a wonderfully understated, informal character that beautifully balances the formality of the architecture.

We had a fairly straightforward plan because the house is basically a cube.

We knew we were gonna have a center hall with rooms that radiated around it, and it's a fairly small house compared to English country houses that we were looking to.

In those houses, the kitchen is usually miles away from the public rooms, the dining room, the living room, but of course, that's not the way we live today.

And so we moved the kitchen into the center core of the house so that the life of the house can encompass all of the rooms.

The stair hall ends up being the most architecturally impactful space because of its height.

So we came up with the idea of making the space an oval.

In a traditional English country house, the staircases were often made of stone.

Here, we did it in wood, but we wanted to have the character of those stone staircases so we cantilevered the treads out from the wall and continued all the way around to reinforce the shape of the room and in turn the shape of the skylight above.

And because this is the most architecturally exuberant space in the house, it has the most decoration, and you see that in the design of the stair itself with its thin colonnettes for the stair balusters, the mahogany handrail, the pair of columns that frame the entry into the primary suite of the house.

Also inspired by English houses, we knew that we wanted to have a stone floor and it has a design of blocks of limestone with black marble as accents, and then even in the skylight with the Greek key border, which also works as a component of the air conditioning system and repeats the motif that you find on the outside of the house.

As a classical architect, you're always looking to understand the language of classicism and the moldings that articulate the architecture that you're making.

We were looking to English regency houses from the early 19th century into the pattern books that guided the design of the moldings for those houses which have a very Grecian influence to them which ties nicely to the Greek revival that we tried to articulate on the exterior of the house.

Decoration is equally important to reinforce the overall effect.

For this project, the clients worked with Thomas Jane, a decorator from New York.

I think that what makes a house like this not feel too formal is the life that's lived within its walls.

They live in every room, there's kids running around.

It's filled with people all the time.

All of this infuses architecture with life.

(peaceful music) (waves lapping) Memories of places can work as a kind of homing beacon on people and that was certainly true of this place for my clients.

The husband grew up in this region which is nestled on Lake Champlain in northern Vermont.

He used to camp around here on the islands that are just off the shore.

The land really resonated with him and pulled on him over the course of his life and finally pulled him back.

About 25 years ago, they bought this property and then they held onto it for a long time and until they reached out to me and to my colleague Deborah Nevins, to come up with some ideas about what they might build here.

It was fairly rough land.

It was wooded, it was boggy and so Deborah Nevins needed to really make something of that, which I think she did.

And part of that was in opening it up a little bit and creating some meadows so that there was a contrast between sense of enclosure and then openness.

What was ingenious about her approach I think was not just in opening up the meadow but then to create these different zones and areas in the land.

It needed not to feel overly contrived.

It needed to feel natural, it needed to feel wild but at the same time it needed to be shaped.

(bright music) When Debbie and I first came to this property with our clients, they took us to see the Shelburne Museum which was the creation of Electra Havemeyer Webb who had married a descendant of the Vanderbilt family, and she had fallen in love with this land and the buildings of the region and she was inspired to create a collection of historic buildings, principally Vermont buildings but also from other areas in New England and bring them together to create a kind of idyllic vision to showcase the architecture of the region, but also exhibit her growing collection of folk art and Americana.

The museum has a tremendous number of buildings dating back for the 18th and 19th centuries.

There's a lighthouse, there's a railroad station, there's an extraordinary round barn, and then of course, the Ticonderoga, which was a steamboat that ran up and down Lake Champlain, which was fun to see because actually my client's father had worked on that boat as a young man when it was still on the lake.

I remember visiting the museum when I was a young architect and being completely blown away by what I had seen there and it was such a treat to come back to it again 'cause it's such a tremendous resource both architecturally and in terms of the landscape and we thought that it was really a wonderful inspiration for the work that we were about to embark on together to reflect on the way that the buildings engage with the land.

(bright music) The house we designed was for a couple but with a large family, and there were always a lot of people here, which is wonderful.

Very quickly it became clear that we needed to have a way for larger groups to gather to have a meal where 20 people sit around a table which was really important to this family and that gave rise to the idea of maybe there could be a barn that could engage the site in a different way.

When we visited the Shelburne Museum, we were particularly struck by the Vermont house, one of the earliest structures brought to the museum.

The stone has a bold graphic pattern which I thought a little bit unusual.

Our clients loved it, and it became the inspiration for the stonework that you find at the house but also we wanted to carry that into the outbuilding so there was continuity from building to building.

Given the kind of agrarian character of this region it seemed natural that we would look to barn forms.

We wanted in the stone part to have classic proportions.

And then I wanted the two wings, one of which holds a little kitchen and the other, a bathroom and a little entry to be mismatched like barns that grow over time and get added onto as needed, as opposed to something that had been so perfectly symmetrical.

What's unique about this land is that it wraps around a point.

One of the reasons you want to be in this place is that engagement with the lake that sense of being on the water, creating that engagement with the view is going to be a very important part of how we solve the design of this building.

One thing that's different but inspired by barns is the big opening in the middle.

Normally that would be large sliding wood doors, and in this case, we made these enormous glass doors that can pocket completely into the thickness of the walls so that the building can become completely open air in the warmer months.

While the inspiration for this building on its exterior was Vermont barns.

On the interior, our clients wanted us to look to something a little different.

The wife is of Norwegian and German descent and she thought it would be interesting if the interior had a little more of a European feel to it.

We found in doing research that while American barns often have trusses that are fairly flat, in European barns, you find more curved timbered members.

And then in terms of the rest of the architecture for the space we wanted to bring the stone from the exterior into the building to make these strong chimney breasts at either end of the room.

These materials, the wood, the stone have a kind of tactile character to them and we thought that in the decoration of the interior, it was important to somehow pick up on that.

And so we used a lot of linen.

That big long table is made from several pieces of 17 foot long timbers.

We found the bullseye mirrors over the fireplaces in England that came out of a railway station in Prague so we had a lot of fun hunting for things.

My client is the daughter of an antiques dealer, and as a consequence, she was very engaged in this whole process and was as much a part of the entire collaboration as any of the members of the design team.

So that became a very rich dynamic in the whole design process.

(bright music) When you design a house for somebody, it's a fairly intimate experience.

You get to know your clients and you get to know their families, and then when you're done, you leave a little piece of yourself behind and it's very gratifying to be able to come back years later and see how the building has settled into the land and how the family has settled into living in the place.

(peaceful music) I often laugh with my clients that you don't need television when you're here because you have this spectacular display.

It's a really wonderful reminder of why you do this as an architect.

You find yourself tapping into memories but you also have an opportunity and kind of a responsibility to create an environment where they can have experiences together that they remember for the rest of their lives.

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