Open House

About a 100 miles north of New York City, a new house sits in a 2-acre clearing in a farming valley between the Catskills and the Berkshires in Columbia County, N.Y. The region has a rich artistic history that began with the 19th century’s Hudson River School painters. “Recently there’s been a vibrant cultural boom with the town of Hudson as the locus,” says David Leven, FAIA, who designed the house with partner Stella Betts, Assoc. AIA, for themselves.

The couple, who together lead New York City–based architecture firm LevenBetts, used to camp on the site now occupied by their 1,350-square-foot Open House, which is designed to explore similar ideas of domestic occupation. “There’s no preset idea of living outdoors,” Betts says of their inspiration.

The house’s exterior exudes permeability, with floor-to-ceiling operable glass doors throughout. “We didn’t think of space as the program, but the views are the program,” Betts says. The five rooms on the ground floor (four interior and one open-air) are trapezoids, flipped in orientation along a north-to-south axis. The southernmost space is not enclosed, and functions as an outdoor porch and primary entrance. The other spaces work interchangeably—“like a campsite, they might be set up differently at different times of year,” she says.

“What’s the minimal way of defining space?” Betts poses. She explains that she and Leven were inspired by the seminal Eames film Powers of Ten (1977), which zooms into and out from a couple occupying a blanket on Chicago’s lakefront. “The blanket is the most reductive domestic space,” Betts says.

Outside the house, exterior living spaces are geometrically defined as circles and linked via linear paths that create a triangle that intersects with the house. “They are very specific spaces—kitchen, dining, firepit, living room, and well,” Leven says. These spaces reprise some of the functions that were necessary when the site was just a camping spot, and the irony is not lost on Leven and Betts that their uses are more stringently maintained than similar spaces within the house.

Everything about the house is intentionally minimal, including the furnishings, which are limited to several benches, a table, and a couple of chairs. The kitchen pantry has open shelves that are identical to bookcases in another space. The exterior is clad in stucco and cement board; inside, Baltic birch plywood lines the floors, walls, and ceilings. The cement board is reprised inside for the kitchen island, the single most functionally specific item within. “It’s as basic as can be,” Betts says.

The stair leading to the second floor is equally simple, made of the same plywood as the interior enclosure; its triangular volume echoes the spatial arrangement of the plan. The second story, smaller than the first, contains the master bedroom and bathroom framed by a green roof on two sides.

The first floor is a concrete deck on grade beams, which raises the volume subtly above the landscape, with conventional wood framing above. The spans are about 17 feet, with a bit larger glass wall openings running along each façade, at 18.5 feet.

The couple never camped in the winter, so building the house has allowed them to use the property as a four-season getaway. But they have noticed how their use of the spaces changes across the seasons; the central space with its wood stove is the most-used living space during the coldest months, while the exterior porch is favored during the summer.

For much of the year, the simple plan of spaces with operable glass on opposing sides of each room lends itself to natural cross-ventilation. The house also employs a water source heat pump with geothermal heating and cooling, pulling 55 F water from ground.

Open House is an essay in strict geometry that riffs on ideas of inside and out, while positing that ideas of “camping” can inform a less transient way of occupying the landscape.

--Project Credits
Project: Open House, Hudson, N.Y.
Client: David Leven, FAIA, and Stella Betts, Assoc. AIA
Architect/Interior Designer/Construction Manager/Landscape Architect/Lighting Designer: LevenBetts, New York City . David Leven, FAIA, Stella Betts, Assoc. AIA (partners)
Mechanical Engineer: Smart NRG
Structural Engineer: Guy Nordenson Associates
Geotechnical Engineer: Keyser Drilling Co.
General Contractor: Javier Gomez
Size: 1,350 square feet
Cost: Withheld

This article appeared in ARCHITECT's September 2018 issue.