延龄草屋丨Prentiss Balance Wickline

Prentiss Balance Wickline positioned this Wake Robin House near a meadow surrounded by evergreen trees in 2019. The design seamlessly ties the natural and built environment together. Key elements include a glassy pavilion-style living space, metal panel patterning, and a unifying tapered roof. The landscape contributes to the house’s integration with its surroundings, resulting in a spatially rich and holistic experience for the clients.

Landscape Integration

The clients, equipped with landscape expertise, closely collaborated with a landscape architect and garden designer. This collaborative effort cultivated a verdant landscape that intricately weaves around the house, effectively integrating it into the existing landscaping and creating a dynamic interior court space.

A single tapered roof unifies the residence, carriage house and sauna, fashioning a generous covered entry promenade. The main residence is characterized by a back bar that accommodates the master suite, studio, and utilities, complemented by a glassy, pavilion-style living space that opens to the meadow on three sides.

Patterning and Material Choices

This roof extends around this space, providing coverage for extensive outdoor patios. Linear concrete patios, interspersed with plantings, feather into the surrounding landscape, continuing the linear pattern in the main living space flooring. This unifying linear pattern manifests in the wood ceiling, accentuated by a series of thin, LED fixtures that traverse both indoor and outdoor spaces.

Patterning reemerges in the entry walk, defined by a series of water jet-cut metal panels, crafting a private interior court for the outdoor shower and sauna. The pattern in these entry panels, abstracted from the wake robin flower – the project’s namesake, imparts a geometric motif varying in opacity along the path, dictated by spatial needs.

Crafting a Holistic Experience

It opens into the lush interior court and becomes more opaque around the outdoor shower area. This pattern perpetuates in the master bedroom headboard.

The overarching aim was to curate an experience woven together through meticulous siting, landscaping, patterns, and fine details, ultimately crafting a rich and holistic experience for the clients.