An architecture of the woods, of otherness — of alterity.

Our clients for The Other House, two accomplished psychoanalysts from Manhattan, asked us to design a small home that would be in every way possible the opposite of a house they had recently completed overlooking a pond on their property in upstate New York. Their plan was to live in this new home and eventually retire to the pond house. The new home would then become a guest house where their children could stay when visiting. The architecture needed to be an alter ego to the pond house. The essence of this brief was not only to discover an architecture of otherness — of alterity — but to be custodians of a process through design, pricing, and construction that would be a restorative antithesis to their previous experience building the house on the pond.

First, the architecture needed to be topologically distinct. There is no front door. Instead of entering from the side of the building one enters directly into the middle of the plan fundamentally changing your relationship with entering. The home surrounds you upon entry with the hospitality of an embrace — the fundamental primitive gesture of a hug.

While the pond house was built on concrete and steel boldly cantilevered over the water and proudly visible from all sides around the pond, The Other House rests on 500 million year old glacial erratic boulders found on the property and from a nearby quarry. The building floats over the landscape resting on these boulders. It is both grounded and untethered.

The Other House is made from a single material: larch sourced locally from a nearby forest. It is detailed to minimize use of other materials. Windows are fixed panels directly glazed into larch jambs. Portions of the larch walls open for ventilation eliminating costs and additional materials found in metal window frames and hardware.

The home is sited partially within a woodland edge. Half of the home rests over a New England stone wall likely built between 1770 and 1830 when the land had been cleared for farming. Stone walls like this are features of New England’s cultural landscape and can be found deep in new growth forests of the region. They are now historic relics frequently scavenged for new stone walls throughout the United States.

Finally, the plan for The Other House, which is modest in scale, is a series of rooms arranged symmetrically with a dramatic range in size and proportion from the private bedrooms to the public space of the kitchen and living room. The range and scale of spaces is similar to those found in both regional mountaineering club lodges and hospitality design. The bedrooms are just large enough for beds and a closet for storage. While modest, the rooms are flanked by large picture windows and operable shutters evoking the nostalgia of living and playing in a treehouse.