After studying architecture at the university and working as a designer in New York, Dana Sottile had clear ideas about what she wanted when she proposed to design her own home in Garrison, NY
But I also knew that the process of building a house could be so frustrating and implacable that I didn’t want to do it alone. I wanted to collaborate with an architect who would be willing to not only make a shower of ideas and details, but also handle the foundations of complying with construction codes and coordinate construction.
“I studied architecture as a postgraduate student,” at the University of California at Berkeley, said Mrs. Sottile, 65, an independent designer and artist. “But I had no license because I felt that the architecture profession covered a lot that I was not interested in doing.”
She and her husband, Kevin Reymond, 69, who works in finance, was already owned by a second house in Garrison as a weekend escape from her main home in Manhattan, but dreamed of having a house directly on the Hudson River.
In 2019, they learned of a property that comprised three lots in a splinter between the river and the railway. It was high enough for a house above the flood zone of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so They were launched and negotiated an agreement to buy it for around $ 1.2 million.
There were two existing houses on Earth, only one of which had electricity. They moved temporarily to the habitable house and would be an extension cable to the other building to use it as an impromptu office when they began planning a new house to replace both structures.
“My vision was to interact with this beautiful landscape,” Sottile said. I also wanted to have a “wow space” with glass walls such as the living room, which would provide no restrictions on the river. From there, he imagined a series “of smaller and intimate spaces, which would be more welcoming”, as well as a separate and smaller building that would work as an art and design study for Mrs. Sottile and a gym for Mr. Reymond.
Looking for someone to work with her in the project, Mrs. Sottile hired and fired three different architecture firms. “I had to let people be because they really did not want to work with me,” he said, adding that he felt frustrated by professionals who seemed more interested in their own ideas than what the house wanted to be. “They really didn’t want me to get involved.”
Trying again, he interviewed two more architects in February 2020 and found a partner arranged in Jeff Jordan, based in New York. Mr. Jordan had also studied architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and had previously designed a house for one of Mrs. Sottile’s classmates. When they met in person, it seemed a perfect combination.
“Dana came to us with a pretty strong idea of ​​what she wanted,” Jordan said. “So it was about listening to her and then refining what he had done.”
To collaborate during the pandemic, they gathered in the improvised office of Mrs. Sottile, sitting together at a long table, with masks.
“The long view of the river is really obvious and really dramatic,” Jordan said. “But what we add to your plan was this idea of ​​the internal spaces of the patio”, with lines of vision that would provide foreground views of trees and plants from inside the house.
The house of 2,251 square feet of a single floor to which they arrived is essentially a box with two cuts for small courtyards. A third courtyard separates the house from a two -story study and a two -story gymnastics building of 899 feet.
Mrs. Sottile and Mr. Jordan kept the palette of simple material. Beyond the large glass extensions, they covered the house with thin roasted bricks of the Italian manufacturer S.aselmo y Aluminum painted brown, and used smaller windows and additional insulation on the back of the house to help it to waterproof the trains that pass. In the living room, the outer brick runs inside the house, where it wrap a wall with a chimney.
A constellation of small embedded lights extends through the roof of the living room and the surge of the ceiling outside, visually joining interior and exterior spaces separated by floor from floor to roof.
To meet Mrs. Sottile and the desire of Mr. Jordan of interesting views, both close and distant, the work of land architecture based in New York populated the patio with pastures and high ferns; Birch, Serviceberry and Japanese Arce trees; and rocks that were saved during excavation.
“The landscape is not a single line,” said Theodore Hoerr, a partner of Terrain Work. “We were trying to create a complete variety of different spatial experiences, with aspects of prospects and refuge so that people feel comfortable.”
After demolishing the old houses in March 2021, the project took more than three years in which RTH Building Company would complete, since surprises such as having to rebuild part of the riverburn slowed things. The total cost was approximately $ 5 million, and Mrs. Sottile and Mr. Reymond moved last September.
But they have no doubt that it was worth waiting and spending. “This house has changed our lives,” Sottile said, and said they can’t help smiling every time they wake up there. “It’s enormously gratifying.”
