Connecticut River House

Working as a design-build team from site planning through construction, the owners, architects, contractors, engineers, masons, and gardeners continuously collaborated to surgically execute a phased residential development on a steeply sloped site along the Connecticut River. Site planning efforts informed a series of residential building additions and sited 4 new structures including a garage, greenhouse, pool house and maintenance barn.

A new driveway connects structures, and a sinuous system of garden paths and woodland trails create opportunities to walk and experience a gradient of nature. Growing edibles in the gardens, greenhouse, and woodland edges adds hyper-local produce to plates in all seasons. Grasslands with colorful wildflowers were established on newly graded sunny slopes and new groves of trees patched fragmented woodlands.

Stone retaining walls were preserved and expanded to create more occupiable landscape spaces and often function as seating elements. Walls deeper in the landscape, especially on the river-side, undulate with the current of the Connecticut River.