Elsewhere Hudson Valley

This project was selected as a winner in the 67th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards, and was featured in the March 2020 issue of ARCHITECT.

Award

“It challenges the status quo of its type with how it engages the landscape, the idea of materiality, its spatial qualities, and how it fits in its context.” —juror Lorcan O’Herlihy, FAIA

Approximately 100 miles north of New York City, a defunct apple orchard in Livingston, N.Y., provides the evocative site for Cambridge, Mass.–based WOJR’s dreamily named Elsewhere Hudson Valley complex of six free-standing guesthouses and an entry pavilion.

Visitors access the complex via an atmospheric brick-arched tunnel whose narrow confines provide a threshold between parking and landscape. Once inside the walled site, an entry pavilion in a simple, single-story volume provides shared living, dining, and kitchen spaces. Beyond that structure, the complex’s six guest houses are slotted on their own allées within the orchard, each taking the place of a handful of trees in the landscape. Each structure’s narrow ground level features living, kitchen, dining, and sleeping accommodations, and is connected via a spiral stair to two upper levels: a second that’s primarily an outdoor roof deck, and a third (dubbed “the perch” by the designers) with an indoor soaking tub overlooking the landscape. The upper volumes are contained within a rhomboid volume whose orientation varies from building to building to preserve privacy for each guest.

A simple palette includes gray-stained plywood “shingles” that clad the wood-framed houses and create an ambiguous scale for the objects in the landscape; interiors are finished in more conventional plywood sheathing.The solution is an exercise in rural urbanism—each of the structures is quite close to its neighbors, with privacy protected by diverting views rather than increasing distance. The three levels of each building allow visitors to experience the distinct vertical spatial qualities of the apple orchard—open at the ground, within the treetops at the roof terrace, and open to expansive views above the trees at the perch. The designers note a desire to project an “atmosphere of pensiveness.” Through exact and thoughtful architectural gestures and spatial ingenuity, Elsewhere Hudson Valley promises to deliver such a place.

Project Credits
Project: Elsewhere Hudson Valley, Livingston, N.Y.
Owner: Luckless Enterprises
Developer: Brighthouse Properties
Design Architect: WOJR, Cambridge, Mass. . William O’Brien Jr., Grace McEniry, Justin Gallagher, John David Todd, Adam Murfield (project team)
Architect of Record: Jon Lott
Structural Engineer: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Civil Engineer: Coughlin Porter Lundeen
Construction Manager: RAPP Construction Management
Visualization: D-Render
Size: 650 square feet (per guesthouse); 750 square feet (entry pavilion)
Cost: Withheld