Photo by Carolyn Bates / CarolynBates.com
Architect David Sellers envisioned creating a home that looked like it was growing out of the mountainside.
Photo by Carolyn Bates / CarolynBates.com
Primary building materials used include local stone and salvaged trees.
Photo by Carolyn Bates / CarolynBates.com
By Maren Thompson Bzdek
When architect David Sellers was retained to build a home in Vermont’s Green Mountains on a sloping, uncleared woodland site, he thought of it as an exciting opportunity. The client offered what every architect dreams of—a nearly unlimited timeline and an abundance of budgetary and creative control. Named one of the world’s 100 foremost architects by Architectural Digest, Sellers had already achieved recognition for his emphasis on designing with nature. The prospective homeowner did give Sellers some guiding principles: a reflection of architectural traditions from his daughter-in-law’s native Japan and trees in the forefront of the design.
Harmonious Design
Sellers envisioned a home that seemed to grow right out of the hillside. “We tried to leave the immediate surroundings wild. There’s no lawn or garden, just a few native plants for minimal landscaping,” he remarks. “An inch away from the house is wilderness.”
Sellers carefully evaluated resources that clearing the site would make available, from huge stone slabs to stately, solid trees. He explains, “It’s like a game of rock, paper, scissors. You look at the choices available to you, all of which might work, and consider factors like aesthetics and embodied energy.”
Once local stone and salvaged trees were selected as the major building materials, Sellers created a design that relied on unsawn timber as the structure’s vertical supports. Started in 1996, the project took two years to complete. Rick Moore, the contractor, had to ignore conventional timetables and procedures and give in to the demands of the site. “The land was so hard to work on,” he says. “We had to start at one end and work to the other, piece by piece, in a sort of backwards fashion. All the retaining walls and landscaping were done before we started on the house. The framework of the tree supports was put in place first, and everything was cut with chain saws, so it was slow work. We did the framing through the winter.”
Sellers’s approach was collaborative and evolutionary in nature, to say the least. Moore remembers, “There was never any true architectural drawing, just sketches. They gave us a pretty good idea, but all of the detailing was a surprise. Only the foundation had true blueprints. And Sellers wasn’t working very far ahead of us. We used a clay model as our guide—and we had to resurrect that from the architect’s dumpster.”
Looking at the holistic beauty of the finished project, dubbed “The Tree House” because of the extensive use of unsawn timber, this story might seem far fetched. Yet a house so unusually grounded in its place could not possibly have been created with conventional building practices. The roofline echoes the surrounding topography and is designed for snow to pile up on its uphill side so the house blends in with the winter environment. As Sellers explains, “It’s designed so that, when the roof is covered with snow in the winter, you can’t even see it from that side.”
Native Ingredients
The use of indigenous materials was made at the top, starting with native Vermont slate for the roof. “Then we realized we’d have big rocks pulled from the site for the foundation, so we started refining it even more—using peeled logs from the site for the interior structure,” says Sellers. These interior details truly reflect Sellers’s commitment to bringing outside materials in and remaining true to the natural beauty of the surroundings. For cost-efficiency as well as elegance, Sellers advises, “Don’t use rocks if you don’t have rocks on your site. Use what meets the main criteria for value, which is based on perceived appropriateness for the site.” The happy result of such a decision is that it leads you naturally to support the local economy and craftspeople, who are adept at working with native materials.
About one-third of The Tree House’s vertical supports are trees from the property. Because they are unsawn, their warmth, sound-absorption quality, and strength are preserved. No supports are stained, and some trees retain their bark. Sellers explains, “The logic of using a tree you have to cut down to clear the site, instead of a milled two-by-four from a tree cut down thousands of miles away, is that it adds flavor and sculptural quality and a connection to the local environment that’s impossible to get any other way.”,
Another Kind of Green
For many people, using local building materials is as much about their wallet as it is about aesthetics. In The Tree House, much of the wood is beech because Vermont was experiencing a beech blight in the late 1990s. The team salvaged dying trees and had them milled and dried. “Favoring local timber sources over the more popular Western timber species is akin to the growing popularity of microbreweries,” Sellers says. “People want that local flavor.”
There was other similar good fortune. Looking for trim to match the slate roof, Sellers polled salvage yards until he finally hit the jackpot. One had just razed a school and had fifty old slate blackboards. “I said, ‘We’ll take all of them!’” he says. To turn this windfall into workable trim, Sellers turned to the same local expert—an experienced installer from a long line of slate men—who had applied the roof. The sauna building, with walls built entirely of these recycled blackboards, was added as the final touch. To avoid disturbing the topsoil, a foundation was avoided by inserting stainless steel pipes into holes drilled in the bedrock for support. “The building sits like a spider, with pins locking it into the ground,” says Sellers. “Water can run undiverted under it.”
Troy Osborne, a member of Sellers’s firm, likens this collaboration among architect, contractor, and homeowner to making a film or performing in a jazz group. “It’s taking a unique concept, adding particular players, and seeing what comes of it.” As head of that ensemble, Sellers is quite satisfied with the result. “As an architect, I can only argue my case for a short time—while I’m working on the project. So in the end, the building must be a self-evident statement about materials and design working together that lasts after I walk away.”
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