When Joe Filippelli was completing architecture school at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College in 2013, his classmate Peyton Coles made him a promise.
“Peyton said, ‘Joe, if you ever start your own office, you can build my house,’” Mr. Filippelli said. “People joke about stuff like that, but you never think it’s going to be real.”
The friends had studied buildings together, but by the time they graduated, Mr. Peyton had realized he didn’t actually want to work as an architect. After growing up on a farm in Virginia, he decided to pursue a career in agricultural technology.
For years, Mr. Filippelli didn’t think much about that conversation, as college friends routinely make such grand declarations that are eventually forgotten. But within a few months of establishing his own architecture firm, North House Architects, in Grand Haven, Mich., in early 2020, Mr. Coles called — he was ready for that house.
By then, Mr. Coles had married Peanut Belk, and the couple had moved to Wild Hope Farm, an organic produce and flower operation that Ms. Belk runs in Chester, S.C. They were in the process of purchasing a 28-acre portion of the 400-acre property owned by Ms. Belk’s parents for $100,000 so they could build a house of their own on the farm.
The project revived Mr. Coles’s interest in architecture and his admiration for his friend.
“I worked next to Joe for three years at school and knew what he was good at, and that we would work well together,” said Mr. Coles, now 38. “Maybe this was a consolation prize for not moving back to Virginia or something, but Peanut pretty quickly let me have fun with it, and to lean into the architectural side of it.”
With plans for a family — the couple now have three children, ages 1 to 4 — Ms. Belk, 33, did have ideas about how the home should function.
“We wanted to spend as much time outside as possible,” she said. “We wanted great lighting and a good kitchen. We wanted an open, comfortable space where we could be cooking while hanging out with the kids.”
It didn’t take long for Mr. Filippelli and Mr. Coles to arrive at a shared vision for the home. Drawing inspiration from Amish-built pole barns and old tobacco drying sheds, they envisioned a 1,528-square-foot rectangle of a building.
“It’s a super simple form,” Mr. Coles said. “We landed on a long, low shape with a peaked roof.”
“Without a doubt, it’s a very agrarian form,” Mr. Filippelli said.
But with that traditional shape as a starting point, the friends were also intent on designing a low-cost, high-performance building that reflected a contemporary take on the American farmhouse.
“One of the things Peyton said early on, which became a driver, was that he wanted to build it with materials you could find at a local lumber yard,” Mr. Filippelli said. “We didn’t want to have high-end fabricators coming in,” he noted, to install expensive, exotic materials.
They were pleased to discover that much of the construction-grade lumber they planned to use was actually grown and milled in the area. “It’s hyperlocal,” Ms. Belk said, much like the produce Wild Hope Farm sells to its customers.
That, in turn, led to a decision to expose the home’s structural elements instead of hiding them behind drywall. Leaving the walls as wood framing and sheathing would have the added advantage of creating an extremely hard-wearing interior.
“We decided that we were going to expose the innards of this thing — the guts of the house — and move all the insulation to the outside of the walls, where it wraps the whole house like a sweater,” Mr. Filippelli said.
The home is built largely with Southern yellow pine, both in lengths of dimensional lumber and plywood. Even where they needed a laminated veneer lumber, or LVL, beam above sliding glass doors opening to a covered porch, they found one from Roseburg, an engineered wood manufacturer just a few miles away.
The closets and cabinets were made from more plywood, and the simple shelves made from pine boards stretch across open walls to help maximize storage.
To clad the exterior, they used cedar that was grown, collected and milled right on the farm into long, slender slats.
“We were milling cedar for farm use but also for this house project,” Mr. Belk said.
Built by Spoke & Hammer Construction Company, the house took a little more than a year to complete, at a cost of about $550,000, and it was ready for the family in February 2023.
Now, Mr. Coles and Ms. Belk relish the sweeping views the house provides, as well as the direct connection it has to the fields.
“We’ve got skylights, we’ve got views in every direction,” Mr. Coles said.
Preparing meals in the kitchen, Ms. Belk said, “It’s fun to watch the kids just playing outside.”
There’s just one unintended downside to all that glass, they joked. “We see storms coming, head on,” Mr. Coles said. “That adds anxiety when you’re farming.”
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