Photo by Peter Beaurline / beaurline.com
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Vermont native Allison Ewing studied traditional and modern houses in Japan. Her husband, South Carolina native Chris Hays, accompanied her and later invited her along when he studied urban networks in Venice.
The buildings they lived in, worked in, and studied left a huge impression. They returned to the States with a need for light and space. In Japan, they absorbed the concepts of ma, “the space between two objects or two edges,” and hashi, which bridges these two edges—either physically or symbolically. In Italy, working in a sun-drenched office “convinced us that nothing is more regenerative than daylight brought indoors,” Chris says.
A New Old House
Allison and Chris, both architects who came to Charlottesville, Virginia in the late 1990’s, wanted a place to build their home and sought pastoral open space they’d fancied in rural Italy. Mere blocks from downtown, they found the Woolen Mills district, now a diverse location that began as a “company village” that grew around a once-thriving cloth mill on the Rivanna River. Historic homes, subsidized housing, and luxury apartments comprise the neighborhood. Nineteenth-century Woolen Mills Chapel still attracts an active congregation while the neighborhood boasts small town charm.
“It has a fairly urban village feeling, completely unique to Charlottesville,” Chris explains. “It feels both urbane—little more than a mile from downtown—and pastoral, because the floodplains make it difficult for people to build in great density here.”
When the couple found a house for sale along the riverbank, with views of the church spire and of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, they bought it.
The abandoned house was ripe for deconstruction. The rural views opened to the south, making southern walls ideal for massive windows that would allow passive solar gain. In addition, Chris says, “we were on the edge of the downtown area, so the city wasn’t going to be precious as far as sticking to historical context. We could do a modern house. We had freedom to explore.”
Multicultural Influences
Allison and Chris designed and saved for eight months, making use of their globe-trotting experiences.
“Having lived in Italy, in a great upper-level villa where we walked through a stone wall into the garden, we were interested in arriving at the garden first,” Allison explains. “So we designed a building in which you arrive under a bridge, and the two wings of the house frame the view. There’s this Chinese tableau of a pond, the neighbor’s house, above that the church, and above that the hillside. That was really the generating concept for the whole house.”
The house, split into two parts, has a bridge that spans the entry court. A pivoting louvered gate provides an entry threshold. A door to the left leads to the main portion of the house, including the living room, dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms for eight-year-old Emily and four-year-old Christopher. Across the bridge, which houses a sitting room, is a wing that contains the work studio downstairs and the master bedroom and bathroom above.
Environmental Design and Construction
As architects who work for William McDonough + Partners, one of the nation’s leading green firms, Allison and Chris understood that material selection involves many considerations: the material’s origin, manufacturing process, transportation impacts, and afterlife.
Their construction budget was less than $150 per square foot. “Our challenge was to balance the budget with the things we wanted to do on all fronts,” Allison says.
Craig DuBose, who built the house, explains, “ I did more research than I would normally do in developing a budget.”
“However,” he adds, “locating suppliers for the special materials was fairly easy, and in the end the cost was not appreciably more than for conventional materials—approximately 5 percent.”
As a Japanese inspiration, Allison and Chris adopted a grid pattern throughout the house, using columns, trim details, and a pattern of cementitious panels similar to tatami mats on the floor. The 2,800-square-foot space is divided into four sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot modules that are further divided into the four-by-eight-foot grid. “In the traditional Japanese house, the spaces are organized around a series of gardens in a seemingly illogical manner, the whole knitted together by an expression of a grid,” Allison explains. “We organized the spaces in a very rational, Western way—a series of spaces like beads on a necklace. It’s a very modern interpretation of that concept.
“One of the strategies we used to make this affordable was to keep the square footage within reasonable bounds, yet have gracious spaces,” she adds. “The living room and dining room are larger, and the bedrooms are modestly proportioned. There’s a hierarchy, and we placed a higher value on the spaces where we wanted to spend time together as a family. By opening up the dining room, living room, and kitchen as one space, we also gained a greater sense of openness while keeping the overall square footage—and costs—down.”
Wedding the home to outdoors and inviting in sunlight are concepts common to many cultures and masterfully applied by Allison and Chris. Downstairs, floor-to-ceiling windows connect public spaces to six hundred feet of decking. Horizontal louvers stretch across the top band of low-E windows, shading the upper level and creating a trellis that shades the lower level of glass and the porch. “Most people probably would have just used less glass and eliminated the exterior louvers—giving themselves less light,” Chris says. “So there was a certain cost increase in living the way we wanted to. But that was one of our great experiments.”
He believes it was worth it. “The best thing about this house is really the connectedness to the outdoors,” he says. “We can just sit on the porch and let the kids play there or in the backyard. We can work in the kitchen and still see what’s going on in the yard. The opportunity to move inside and outside—having that breathing room and interaction with the outdoors—is just wonderful.”
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