For years, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood didn’t need much when they escaped to their ramshackle second home in rural Rhode Island. Simply having a few days off was all they needed.
Ms. Andraos and Mr. Wood are the founding partners of WORKac, a New York-based architecture firm with an international mix of projects. Ms. Andraos was the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation until 2021 (and is now dean emeritus) where Mr. Wood also taught. In addition, they are the parents of two children, Ayah, now 15, and Kamil, 12, so leisure time has always been in short supply.
Nevertheless, when they were visiting Mr. Wood’s parents near Hope Valley, R.I., in 2008, they happened to learn that one of the neighbors was selling a prime 22-acre parcel of land. The private property was nestled against a river and surrounded by undeveloped forest and state-protected land. It came with a house, but not one they liked.
“The house was a mess,” said Ms. Andraos, 52.
“It was a hunter’s log cabin from the 1950s that they added onto in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Mr. Wood, 57, noting that the whole structure was in a state of decay.
When they visited the site, however, it was so idyllic they couldn’t pass it up — they purchased it for $500,000. “We bought it for the land,” Ms. Andraos said.
In the years that followed, the family used the house as a rustic cabin, living outdoors most of the time and going indoors mainly to sleep, as they visited the lot sporadically. “It was like camping,” Ms. Andraos said.
That changed during the pandemic when, like many New Yorkers, they left the city and found themselves living full-time at their summer escape, trying to balance their busy professional lives while also looking after their children, who were attending school online.
It didn’t take long for the home’s shortcomings to become abundantly clear: the septic system failed, which required taking showers outdoors; the roof was inhabited by animals and filled with mold; they found asbestos everywhere they looked; and the foundation was so far gone that a structural engineer told them it needed to be replaced.
The only practical solution, they decided, was to demolish it and build a new house.
After returning to New York in the fall of 2020, they continued working on plans for a new house before finally tearing down the old structure in February 2022 to begin construction.
The new 2,475-square-foot house sits in the same place as the old one, but is far more contemporary, and taller, than a log cabin. One corner of a blue metal roof, chosen to blend with the color of the sky, soars high enough to create a double-height living space as well as a small second floor containing the primary suite, which opens onto a private roof deck.
After discovering that everyone in the family enjoyed showering outdoors during the pandemic, they added three outdoor showers, including two within cutouts in the roof.
At the back of the house, facing the river, the roof has integrated awnings that can provide shade for a deck on hot summer days while also controlling solar gain inside the house.
Where the old house had broken windows and doors that wouldn’t close, the new one is airtight. Built to Passive House standards with help from ZeroEnergy Design, it has 14-inch-thick insulated walls, triple-glazed windows and a heat recovery ventilator to bring in a constant stream of fresh air. Heating and cooling, when needed, is provided by a heat pump powered by solar panels on the roof.
To finish the interior, Ms. Andraos and Mr. Wood wanted to work with friends and collaborators. For the main living space, they asked with Petra Blaisse, a designer based in the Netherlands, to produce an enormous pink-and-brown silk curtain with clear plastic cutouts that spans the entire space.
“She had done a curtain when we got married,” Ms. Andraos said, “so we wanted her to make another really big curtain for the space.”
They commissioned a large table that doubles as a place for dining and working at the middle of the space from Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of New York-based MOS Architects. For the kitchen and bathrooms, they worked with Karim Chaya of the Lebanese company BlattChaya to produce cement tiles in various patterns and colors.
Completing the project took longer than they expected. After building most of the structure with a local contractor and then encountering delays, they called in a friend from New York, Eze Bongo, to finish the job. Their home was finally complete this spring, at a cost of about $1.2 million.
“The kids are a little mad, because they feel like they missed four years of Rhode Island,” when they had no house to stay in, Ms. Andraos said. “But in a few years they’ll be going and having parties with friends. They’ll make it up.”
The post A Contemporary House Soars in Rural Rhode Island appeared first on New York Times.
