The Golden House was designed around a teak-lined entry hall, a room whose walls, floors, and ceilings unwind among dynamic lives: lives of residents; lives of old and new architectures; lives of wholes and parts; lives of light and dark; lives of air; formal and informal lives; textured and abstract lives; public and private lives; indoor/outdoor lives; lives of art; lives of laundry; lives of what you see and what you don't see; technological lives;…lives still to be lived.

The Golden House was built around a box, an unfurling wood box.

The house is organized around a simple prism that unfurls — like the limbs of a spider — into the new and existing wings of the residence. The existing residence was constructed in four stages: the original farm house (the new house's "salon") was built in the eighteenth-century, followed by two additions in the mid and late nineteenth-century, and a final addition 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 figure winds its way into new and old, low and high, formal and informal regions of the residence. These spatial divisions are rendered moot by the new architectural figure, a compound figure, which slips fleetly into and out of them, inscribing relationships that make the house 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 functions and technical systems. Its surfaces and edges frame views and define circulation. Details accentuate the thinness of the wood/plaster relationship. Replacing "depth" with "lightness" allows surfaces to slide effortlessly over structural and mechanical technologies. The only exposed piece of steel in the house is a single column outside the sun room. Rather than having their own essential status, materials are put into the service of geometry: they migrate unimpeded from room to room, from up to down, from vertical to horizontal. Wood, plaster, and stone are used to foster alignments and extensions that 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'-2" ceiling height of the existing 18th-century structure) holds a steel frame that is co-planar with the heating and cooling system — a technical integration that 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 park, disappearing into pockets in their fully open position. At the foot of the master bedroom sleeping area, large sliding doors turn the room into a sleeping porch as they glide out onto the terrace (a pocket-less pocket door). A family dining area opens onto the exterior green, tying the kitchen and the dining room directly to the southern landscape. Next to the alder-lined salon — an intimate, inward-facing space — the sun room's glass walls can be slid away, converting the room to a covered terrace looking onto the limitless expanse 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."