Page 82 - Fall 2019

Private; First-Class
Private; First-Class

Exurban Houses Reflect Varied Approaches

to Modern Design by Steven K. Dickens, AIA, LEED AP

The Wildcat Mountain House.

Chapter Design Award in Architecture living/dining/kitchen; master suite; guest bedroom wing; and
garage/service wing.
Wildcat Mountain Residence Each volume is held back from the stone walls by a hyphen—
The Plains, VA a lower-ceilinged connector—about four feet wide, which serves as
circulation space and allows each volume to read as a discrete
David Jameson Architect rectangular box. Aside from the garage, which is clad in cedar
boards, the wings are articulated by glass walls and capped with
Lighting Designer: David Tozer green roofs. Views outward are varied: the living room, notably,
Structural Engineers: Linton Engineering, LLC looks across a terrace and infinity-edge pool to the meadows and
MEP Consultants: Foley Mechanical, Inc. farms below in the valley, whereas the guest wing looks toward a
General Contractor: PureForm Builders wooded hillside. The purity of forms is emphasized by a restrained
material palette, deceptively minimal detailing, and, in the case
With this country house in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the of the guest room wing, a cantilever over the descending slope,
firm of David Jameson Architect continues its tradition of which allows the bottom of the rectangular box to be visible. In
creating immaculately-detailed, simple-yet-complex houses in these moves, emphasizing purity of form, the house draws from
bucolic locations. longstanding modernist traditions.
The primary organizational device on the ground floor is a What makes this house distinctive, however, is the second floor,
pinwheel of heavy stone walls, oriented parallel and perpendicular also in the form of a pinwheel but rotated about eight degrees
to the slope of a meadow. The void between the walls at the center from the grid of the main level. The architects explain that this
is an atrium/entrance hall space that connects the four wings of the shift orients the upper level toward more distant views of the Blue
house. Each wing is articulated as a separate rectangular volume: Ridge, though it is also clearly a dramatic compositional gesture.

80 ARCHITECTURE AHEAD