The Golden House is organized around a compound figure: a four-sided box that unfurls—like the limbs of a spider—into the new and existing wings of the residence. The existing house was constructed in four stages: the original farm house (the new house’s “salon”) was built in the 18th century, followed by two additions in the mid and late nineteenth-century, and a final one during the 1940s. Given not only this history but also a series of vastly differing architectural qualities, our aim was to inscribe a new coherency in the house. The teak-lined figure winds its way into new and old, low and high, formal and informal regions of the residence. These divisions are rendered moot by this new architectural figure, which slips into and out of them, inscribing relationships that make the house into more than the sum of its parts.

The unfurled, teak box is at once primary and secondary. Its wood skin skates across the heavier obligations of program and technical systems. Its surfaces and edges frame views and define circulation. The wood’s alignments and extensions nest, overlap, and tie together the house’s many spaces.
The thinness of the unfurled box belies a compact technical system. The house’s densely compressed section (originating in the 6’-5” ceiling height of the original 18th century structure) holds a steel frame that is co-planar with an HVAC system--a technical integration that both provoked new ways of conceptualizing these systems and also catalyzed the invention of new fabrication logistics.

Located close to a road, the house opens up onto a large park. From the carport, the house is approached laterally, with an informal entrance on the street side and a formal entrance on the park side. Large, multi-leaf, glass doors open the entire south face of the house toward the south, disappearing into pockets in their fully open position. At the foot of the master bedroom sleeping area, large sliding doors turn the master bedroom into a sleeping porch. A family dining area looks onto the park from the side of the kitchen. A four-season porch looks onto the limitless green of the southwest view.

The exterior cladding combines wood siding and basalt. The wood siding on the old and new portions of the house is dimensionally identical, though it is detailed as lapped on the existing areas of the house and smooth on the new areas. The first floor of the new wing of the house is clad in basalt, as are the terraces and many floor areas, creating an occupied plinth that is equal parts “platform” and “building.”