AREA 51
SHENANDOAH COUNTY, VIRGINIA

This new house sits on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley and looks across the Valley to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The house is composed of three volumes. The arrangement of the volumes forms an entry courtyard, and opens the house up to the Valley and mountains beyond.

The building was constructed using pre-engineered trusses on rectangular boxes, but the boxes’ southern edges were torqued, in order to create a variety of spaces within the volumes. These idiosyncratic, angled, and highly detailed sides face towards the mountains, in order to maximize the views of the Valley.

The majority of the house was constructed with common residential materials—cement board siding, asphalt shingles, and stock windows—while the angled edges are sheathed in bark siding. The majority of the interior is gypsum wall board, but along the southern edge there is wood paneling, wood ceiling, and poplar bark shingles. Off- the- shelf kitchen cabinets were used, but installed into built- in boxes, which mediate the scale between the ordinary cabinets and the high ceilings of the living volume.

A minimalist aesthetic was avoided on the interior, in an effort to knit together our clients‘ eclectic tastes in art, decorative objects, and furniture. Inside and out the house uses rich materials like cedar, bark, cnc milled wood from mafi, custom handmade light fixtures and more. Regarding their new panoramic view of the mountains and sky, they said, “weather was something we used to watch on TV. Now the weather is our TV.”