Tates Creek, Kentucky 1999
I was approached by the owners of this house with the challenge of fashioning a meaningful house amidst the drumbeat of homebuilders’ empty boxes that hover together in one development after another all over central Kentucky.

This project is located on a beautiful site in the contoured landscape of horse farms and country roads adjacent to a major river. The program of 7,100 square feet spoke to me as a caution flag against bigness. To scale down the long list of desired spaces, I decided to section the house into the natural slope of the landscape and include two out buildings at the edges of the entry yard.

The main house generates itself from the old plan-form known as the saddlebag house, where a central chimney acts as an armature for two almost identical wings on either side. The system of porches that run around the perimeter of the main house provides a kind of ship’s deck that allows one to step out of the house at any point for a breath of fresh air.