In April of 1775, troops of Minutemen journeyed down a cart trail lined by dry set stone walls, pastures, and farms to join the Battles of Lexington and Concord kicking off the start of the American Revolution. Today, the route remains in its original condition. We had the unique and rare opportunity of designing a new home on a piece of this historic land, once owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, amongst 300-year-old farms and family homesteads developed over time culminating with hundreds of acres of undeveloped woodland journaled by Henry David Thoreau. Our goal was to create a design parti that seamlessly blends with the rich history of the site as if it was built in the eighteenth century and added onto over time and then carefully restored.
The house is broken up into pieces to evoke a sense of implied history, break down the scale of the program, and respond to the colonial nature of the locale. The central component reads as the original farmhouse with a simple, symmetrical, three-ranked federal colonial box with Greek Revival overtones. The assemblage suggests that the house was added onto over time including a secondary outbuilding and a stable building which were later connected by breezeways and repurposed for modern living. Although newly constructed, during our clients’ first Thanksgiving, the continuing comment was, “When did you finish the restoration?” which we consider to be the highest form of praise and speaks well to the approach and success of the project in terms of its scale and sense of place.