Berkshires House VII
Photos by Michael Lavin Flower
An adventurous pair of houses with an interesting dynamic. The clients are brothers, both avid fans of New England industrial architecture, the grittier the better, who asked us to design two houses for their young families on two separate sites. It soon became apparent that their ideas of what it meant to transform industrial into domestic were polar opposites.
Basically, this brother wanted a narrative exterior recalling old mill buildings developed over many decades in a historic continuum. Each of the four buildings of the assemblage uses a different material and mill reference: brick, clapboards, corrugated steel, and concrete block. The interior is calm and restrained, in contrast to the active exterior (though the client could not resist a pair of bridges).