An adventurous pair of houses with an interesting dynamic. The clients are brothers, both avid fans of New England industrial architecture, the grittier the better, who asked us to design two houses for their young families on two separate sites. As we worked with each of them, it became apparent that their ideas of what it meant to transform industrial into domestic were polar opposites, giving us an opportunity to analyze two directions in what might constitute an “industrial” architectural style. Basically, Brother M wanted restraint on the outside, chaos on the inside, while Brother S looked for chaos on the outside, restraint on the inside.

For Berkshire House VI, Brother M wished for an un-articulated Butler-like building, inscrutable from the street, and repetitive like the vast wooden mills on Maine’s Pompanoosac River, but with a varied and dynamic interior. Multiple projects were always underway in this household, and they wanted the mess to be an exciting feature of the house, not a constant source of stress. Bridges and overlooks, even in the porch, contribute to the anarchy.