Nantucket Courtyard House by Workshop/APD. Residence with Modern Architecture & Minimalist Interior

This was my dream, was to actually build this house. It takes a lot of luck and a lot of magic to be able to do that. You have to have the right site, you have to have the right client, you have to have the right budget, you have to have the right team. And somehow it all came together here. I'm Andrew Kotchin. I'm one of the founding principals at Workshop APD and we are here at a pretty special project that we created in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Working on a site that's set deep off the street is oftentimes a challenge to understand how you can create a sense of arrival into the home. And for us here, it was very much about sculpting the topography, creating sort of an undulating driveway experience where the house reveals itself in a series of layers upon arrival. First, you engage a shed, which gives you a hint at the architecture that's to come, something that feels different than the surrounding context. As you come past the shed and down the driveway, you get a sense of there's something different happening here. There's a series of pavilions that begin to stack and align themselves into the topography of the site, each one having a different programmatic element to it. And how you experience them, how you move through the space between each one of them is really where the magic happens on this property. It's how you frame those views from inside to outside, outside to inside, and coming through the landscape. How they soften the edges of the architecture when it meets the ground is just something that we really haven't done before in this way. It really summarizes, I think, our firm's 25 years worth of work on this island of what we've tried to achieve, how we've tried to understand the context and understand this notion of gable form architecture and put it together in a way that tells a modern lifestyle story. In any new project, we try to test ourselves and push ourselves to do things that we haven't done before. And in this project, we certainly push to do things that were not inherent and obvious on Nantucket. You know, ultimately, you try to make things look easy. You try to make it look like it's seamless embedded into the architecture, but there is a structural component to this, a technical component to it, that in working with a series of great consultants, we're able to achieve. These are things that we take pride in, like they're fun. It's not just about the glossy end product, it's also about the process getting here. As a firm that loves to build, a firm that builds all over the country, I think those challenges will ultimately make us better as we move forward as a practice.