Project Description
2009 RADA
Custom / More Than 3,500 Square Feet / Merit
The architect and the owner, a landscape architect, worked in tandem from day one of this project—and it shows. Perched on the edge of a river gorge, the house and guesthouse align from south to north and are linked by a stone wall that serves as a spine. In between, overlapping interior and exterior spaces keep the lush setting front and center.
“We’d flip things back and forth until we found a nice balance between the formality of the house and this pretty rough and rambunctious landscape,” says Richard Williams, AIA. “We looked at vernacular forms, stretching the dimensions to a point where it seemed spacious but never out of scale.”
One judge said the design “elevates the mundane Virginia farmhouse, yet does so with a complete lack of pretension.”