Project Details
- Project Name
- Quarry House
- Architect
- Gray Organschi Architecture
- Project Types
- Single Family
- Size
- 5,020 sq. feet
- Year Completed
- 2016
- Project Status
- Built
Project Description
Reconstructed, refitted, reprogrammed… phoenix-like in its new life as a home for a family with college-age children, this house occupies a long-abandoned granite quarry overlooking a series of contiguous inlets, salt marshes and a small harbor on the Connecticut shoreline. Originally built in the seventies, the home suffered from an array of technical woes caused by a lifetime of exposure to coastal weather. In spite of the building’s dire condition, the design team appreciated the basic spatial relationships of house and site and its low-slung, discreet massing as seen from the water. Our clients, a university administrator and a professor of music, purchased this property from the original owners with the intent to restore the home and protect the site. Working as both architect and general contractor, the design team rearranged the upper floor, moving the master bedroom to the east where an enormous granite outcropping shields early morning sun. The kitchen moved west, overlooking an inlet and salt marsh. The living and dining rooms and their exterior terraces resettled to the south, affording views across the rocky harbor to Long Island Sound. The designers reduced obstructions to views by removing heavy guard rails, adding full height windows and doors, simplifying roof, wall and floor surfaces, extending overhangs to reduce heat gain from summer sun, and lifting the northern corners of once flat roof planes to introduce clerestory windows. In addition to careful spatial manipulations to the existing home, the design team introduced a series of new wooden elements throughout the project. Salvaged wood from the home’s framing was reused to restructure and extend roof and floor cantilevers. New charred cypress siding boards (using the traditional Japanese shou sugi ban method) resist fungal rot and weathering. Those same boards sheath a large bi-fold garage door, turning a familiar suburban fixture into a simple panel of wood, complementing the hues in adjacent stone walls. Maple boards sourced from Vermont form the interior surfaces and the millwork, doors and cabinetry. At the entry, deep vertical cypress louvers obscure views until one enters the house. An accent wall clad in wide, matched cypress boards separates a new stair from the lower bedroom level. The stair guard is formed from twisted bentwood maple slats which delaminate from the maple clad walls in the stairway. Wood is the means by which an outwardly modest building delivers spaces that reach beyond the boundaries of its rooms.