Inside An Experimental Off-Grid Modern Cabin | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

We created a manifesto to study architecture freed from the purely objective, right? No bedrooms, no doors. From origins of architecture we explore in. That is, that the interior is more important than the exterior. This is what we live in. I'm Stephen Hall, architect, and we're here at the Examin House in Rhinebeck. And I'm Dimitra Tsakhrelia, an architect as well, who contributed to the design of this house. This project started really as research, a kind of experimental project in our studio. So we started with Peter Sloterdijk's trilogy about spheres, his three volumes. We wanted to work with the ideas that he was working with. You're born in a sphere, the universe. You come out into the sphere of your family. You inhabit it, the globe. And then there's a kind of idea of the form of the universe and the political form of reality. What we did was we made a bunch of drawings and made models where we had a trapezoidal volume and it was being intersected by spheres. And what we were interested in was the interior. And we called the project Explorations of In, X of In. And that's how this house got its name, because it came out of these models and these drawings. We worked on the design longer than it took to build it. We began to work it from the inside out. And you will notice that this house has no bedrooms, zero bedrooms, but it sleeps five. Every space is connected. One leads you to another. And as you come into this space, you realize that the whole thing opens up and turns around you as you walk around it. That's the sunrise sphere intersecting, and that becomes the entranceway. This is the sphere overhead, which cuts the building in this direction. And this is the western sphere, which is a virtual sphere. So this is the entrance of the house. This sphere that we just entered in is facing east. And you can see that the whole materiality is made out of wood. And all the details you see are built in and designed from us to fit in that concept and in this space. The space out of this first sphere opens out into the living room, into the kind of main space. And you kind of slightly go down, and the space opens up in a kind of generous height. It's a very small footprint. It's only 980 square foot. But because of the kind of volume of space, you have a more generous experience. And then the living room is also built in. The space kind of slightly goes down to form the kitchen area. Living happens between those two different planes. The furniture is mid-century furniture. Otherwise, it is designed by Stephen Hall. And you can see the materiality. The stair is crafted out of mahogany. There is solid wood everywhere that you see the frames of the windows and doors custom-made. Even the carpet is a Stephen Hall carpet. The kitchen steps down as it follows the topography outside and the rest of the sides stepping down. And there is a cross breeze coming from those two doors that open up. And you see the bottom of the sphere. You realize you're underneath that space that opens up. And looking out to it, you see the sun in the night. It brings light down from the space above. From here, you can open out into the garden. And you can sit outdoors. So the inside-outside works here beautifully. The furniture is designed by Stephen. Very simple. We call this the A-chair. And the kitchen is also all made out of wood. Every cut in the space has to do not only with the natural daylight that comes in during the day, but also with the way the night experience works. We respect the experience of the darkness, the subtlety of dimness of the light. So all of these windows and cuts towards the interior become spaces where one room illuminates the other. One space brings light into the next. And it opens up, of course, into the big sphere in front of us on the west that brings the last light of the day in as the sun sets. This space faces to the west on the Hudson River. And you can actually sit here and relax and contemplate and look out into the forest and down into the kitchen. And that's a kind of connection space as well. The light fixtures are actually part of the concept models that initiated the design of this house. This is actually the west cut. This window is right in here. So if you invert the spheres, you get the negative space, which is the house itself. So this conceptual model we like to explore in all different scales and make it part of the experience of the house. These light fixtures are printed out of corn-based bioplastic. That's a 3D printing material. The geometry forms this kind of cutout that provides privacy for the bed next to the window with a natural ventilation. This piece of the bathtub was crafted by Javier Gomez, our contractor. So all the details that you see are handcrafted. And the whole house is made like a piece of furniture. It's made like the interior of a guitar or a piece of instrument. And it's crafted with lots of care for every detail. And here is a very exciting space as you go up over the sphere that we entered the house. And this space is meant to be a kind of raw space where you see the structure of the sphere. You see the ribs that they had to cut to form the interior where they shaped the wood in this kind of curved layers. And that's also a very exciting spot as you come up and you have this nook that's very private. And then also you can look down and the entire space opens up and kind of big surprise I think as you really are up against the ceiling and the space slopes down into the open living room. That's really a space of compression and decompression and looking out. Water is life. This water pond literally brought life onto the site as we position it to the south. And not only does it activate and illuminate the interior with water reflecting through into the interior, but it also with the water lilies that we brought into this pond brought the frogs in and the turtles. And they are really a beautiful company to have in this surrounding. We want it to be as ecological as possible. It has closed cell insulation. This is all natural wood, no finishes, no you know sort of toxic materials at all. Even the wooden windows are solid mahogany cut and without any finish on them. That's a natural pine board floor and it has a geothermal heating and cooling system. And that works perfectly in the wintertime. It can be zero degrees outside. It's 70 in here with the radiant floor. And in the summertime we're using that same 51 degrees that's 300 feet below the surface of the earth and cooling it. The water here is natural well water. We get eight gallons per minute at 300 feet and it's pure water. It's very pure so there's no chlorine in it. And even the facade is weighed out of a special stucco that's called porover. And that was an experimental application. This material is made out of a hundred percent recycled glass and it's very lightweight and porous. So the concept of the sphere that goes into all the different scales of the kind of human experience comes down to those tiny little one millimeter. So no fossil fuels, geothermal heating and cooling, organic materials, preserve the natural landscape, 30 acres of preservation. You know I just saw a wild fox the other day running. An orange wild fox. There's a pond with frogs and turtles. They eat the mosquitoes. You can have water that comes off of your roof, collect all your rainwater, but if you make it ecological, that is turtles and frogs, you don't have any mosquitoes. The most important thing is nature. Preserve what's here and allow for the wildlife to exist around the house. So when you come and look out the windows you see you're surrounded by animals and the sound of the frogs and the turtles passing. The way to make this abstract thinking of the sphere into a site specific project is how to orient it so that the light comes in and works within the space in these different times of the day. The way this roof is sloping to the south made a perfect place for the solar panels to come on and all these different adjustments that happened once you know this is a location. And the passive aspect in terms of the energy use, the way it's isolated and works with natural ventilation has also to do specifically with this location. So this is the future, right? We're living in a time, in a place. Different places in the world have different conditions of right now and we're lucky to be in the Hudson Valley. It gets cold, it snows, but that's part of the excitement. Big nice snow, you know, outside. Moonlight reflecting on snow coming in through these round windows. Gorgeous. Absolute silence, stars in the sky, and then autumn. This is all orange and yellow and red out here like New England is, you know. I grew up in Seattle and the trees just don't turn, you know. Kind of a pale yellow. Here you get bright orange and red and yellow and some green mixed in. So it's like living in a painting in full. We've entered a new phase in humanity where we actually understand the brain in ways we never understood it before. There was that old adage that Winston Churchill said, first we shape our buildings and then they shape us, right? Well that was 1944. This now we know is somewhat true. So in a certain sense we passed into a new phase of understanding the importance of architecture. Light, space, volume is very important to human existence, to psychology. There's a kind of winter sickness where there's not enough light in a space. But now we also understand that daylight and the way the seasonal light works on your body and your psyche through your brain is something that architecture can contribute to health. The first thing we did is we commissioned the great poet Robert Kelly to write a poem about this property. And he spent two months working on this poem, Phases of the Earth. Where he says, so poetry and music make time pass and architecture makes space pass into meaningful form. No, I mean architecture makes music stand still. That's more like it. Here time turns into space. That's one of my favorite moments of that. What is time? What is space? How can poetry and art and architecture connect? How do they connect?