I’ve written before about the importance of site in our work. In my previous post, I voiced the questions that we’re always asking ourselves:
“How do we take advantage of the best the site has to offer without taking away from the site itself? The natural beauty of the site is arguably more important than the building; how do we emphasize and compliment this?”
Lately my colleague Paul and I have been working on a fun project up on Lake Superior’s south shore near Marquette, Michigan with a fabulous site which is a perfect example of this challenge. The property is rugged, with rocky outcroppings and northern vegetation. Pines, birch and poplars dot the landscape, and pine needles carpet the ground between blueberries and thimbleberries. Best of all is the turquoise water swirling along the rocky shoreline and stretching as far as the eye can see.
At the first site visit, it was quickly established that there were two good building sites. One was the clear top of a large rock knob with commanding views out over the lake, the other a glen where the house would nestle among the rocks and pines with a filtered view of the water. Everyone gravitated toward the rock and its views, so it was decided to site the house there. We began to work on schematic designs to organize the program while navigating the unique topography of this location.
However, with the first design drawn our clients felt that there was something not quite right, and after two, three, four more iterations they still couldn’t put their finger on it. Finally during a meeting the realization was this: they loved being up on top of the rock. They liked to picnic, climb around, explore, and hang out. It’s the best part of the property, and therefore they didn’t want to put a house on it!
For our next meeting, we got to work on a design for the glen site, reusing parts of previous designs that they had liked and weaving them into a cohesive whole that fit the new location. The house was to be on three levels, with the first sitting between two rock outcroppings and the main bridging between them. It felt like the house was more concealed now, blending quietly into the pines and sitting lower on the landscape. A bonus was that in its new surrounds the rock and pines afforded it protection from Lake Superior’s fierce winds and storms, and the coziness in the glen was reassuring. Our clients loved it from the first sketch.
