Choice Not Chance
(Page 2 of 3)
July/August 1987
By the Mother Earth News editors
To create a sense of openness that would belie the actual square footage, windows were carefully positioned to include the outdoors as part of the visual space. Dark timbers carry the line of sight from the ceiling through six-foot-wide expanses of glass on the south, southeast and southwest sides of the octagonal main room to offer a panorama of woods, grass and sky (through openings in the deck roof). Simple sliding units in the bedrooms greet the morning. A kitchen skylight and two small north-side windows—casement in the bath and awning in the kitchen—provide natural lighting.
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To ensure solitude, Ira picked a three-acre site that backs onto 50 acres of undevelopable woods. Neighbors are barely visible in winter, not at all in summer. Cars park 100 feet away and out of sight at the end of a 700-foot driveway leading from a little-traveled country road. Even this decision involved a bit of a compromise. Ira had originally wanted the only access to the house to be by foot bridge, but bowed to the need of occasionally getting close with a car.
As the interior layout works subtly with the outdoors, the house's brown facade blends into the pines, quietly attractive as a Japanese teahouse; a house to be looked out from, rather than looked at.
The Octagon and triangle work together to marry various spaces geometrically.
Windows and lines of sight carried by timbers link the inside with the outdoors. Light traces across the walls through small, high windows. From the couch, there's a clear view of the sky through a triangular opening in the deck's roof outside.
Craft
Hadi did most of the construction by himself, hiring helpers only for heavy work, such as placing pine timbers for the post-and-beam frame. Showing an unusual blend of talents, he switched from architect to mason to plumber to electrician to framer to trim carpenter to tile setter to cabinetmaker.
The tile work, in particular, is an important detail element that links the geometric pieces of the interior. Kitchen floor and stove nook tiles are the same and are tied by a band that wraps around the perimeter of the oak parquet floor of the main room. Mexican tiles on the backsplash and counter edge in the kitchen are repeated in the bathroom above and below a band of two-inch gray tile. Two hand-painted Portuguese tiles visually brace the woodstove in its nook.
Hadi's cabinetwork—all custom oak carried even to the window trim—speaks for itself, but it took a few years for Ira to fully appreciate how tightly the house is sealed. A Fisher Grandma Bear woodstove heats the house easily, even on frigid upstate-New York winter nights. It takes a few hours to fully heat the extensive tile work of the wood-stove bay, but steady warmth through the night is the reward. Four years after moving in, Ira and Nuri are still burning cordwood from trees that were cleared for construction.
