Inside A House Designed to Blend Into Nature (House Tour)

When you approach the home in a car or on foot and you look up from below, you see this dark charred exterior which contrasts perfectly with the light bright forest. My name is Bill Bickford, founding partner of Northworks Architects, lead designer of the Culver Homestead. We are near the town of Culver in northern Indiana, which is really the heartland of America. As you look around with the cornfields and the soy fields and the farm country. The land is about 60 to 70 acres with rolling hills and old hardwood forests. A treat for an architect to build a home, an untouched piece of property. The clients came to us with a program and we worked with them on how that layout works best with the site but also their lifestyle and entering into a new chapter of life and having the home facilitate that next phase. When you have this much space to spread out, we do love for a house to almost feel like a small village of volumes and in this house we have an entry where you walk in and get a view through the home back to where you came from and in that entry is your dining space, your ultimate gathering of family and friends. Beyond that initial experience of entry is your kitchen, beyond that is your study and then back to the middle of the home we have this living room that we're in now and then beyond the living space is a glass connector which brings you to the master suite. When you then walk down through the home you walk out that lower level to the terrace, to the pool, to all the landscape below. On a project that's custom like this it's very important to have a contractor involved early on, part of the design team, where we are looking at details together, looking at site logistics together and when everyone owns that design together it's a much more successful outcome. I'm Tim Merchant, I'm co-owner of Skyline Builders. We were the general contractor on this project, the Culver Homestead. We originally, we met the homeowners early on when they were thinking about buying this property and when we first came here it was fully wooded as a matter of fact we walked around with Bill the architect and at one point we couldn't even see him where where he was going to reach the barn and so it became a lot more of a process to get back here to the site but it really turned out nice. It is a modern farmhouse and with that layout we always try to make sure we approach it with a restraint of material selection but it really in this case is wood, glass, stone and metal. To achieve that subtle contrast of light and dark we first selected our limestone and that deep dark richness of the Delta Black Acoia was the perfect selection to give more emphasis upon the different volumes of the exterior and we were very interested in that charred wood look that gives you the hand element of creation and then for the roof we used a corrugated barn sheet metal product that Skyline Builders brought to the table and we all loved it. Another material we used was the pre-finished Acoia in the custom gray for the decking. You know here in Indiana we can get a pretty good fluctuation from you know hot temperatures in the summer to pretty cold in the winter and you know a natural wood product we're always worried about the movement and how the sun changes the color of it but the Acoia really seems to be stable you know I can go back now and color is the same there's no gaps it's it's really held up well and it was it was a great product for us to use. At Northworks we've been working with Delta Millworks for many years. They're able to meet our aesthetic needs and they are great collaborators all along the way and they take pride in their product where they want to follow up and see how it looks a couple years later. Northworks worked with the clients on the interior design as well for this project. And our goal with the interior design working along with the client's great taste and great collection of art was to make sure that every room flows together not just physically but visually. My favorite part of the whole project is the motor court and the approach. Because you have so much land and space around you that motor court gives you that intimate welcome of the home. I just think it's it's a great project it's really one of our favorites just how the whole exterior looks and you know just the feel of the whole property. What I'm most proud of on this project are the quick emails and texts I receive from the client from time to time expressing how much they love to live here expressing how much comfort they find in their new home.