Inside a Family Home Built Around a 12,000-Year-Old Boulder | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

The boulder is always present. You see it through triple glass that is curved. You see it through a round window in the kitchen. You are aware of the boulder even in the spaces that don't have direct views because the walls are either radial or curved around the center of the rock. Welcome to the rocking house in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. I designed this and built this with the help of local craftspeople and it is also my family's home. When we found the property this boulder was magically resting on the highest spot of the land and we felt this was an invitation to design a house right around it. That's where everything started. We had a compass built, we circled, made the first courtyard with a plum, a level and a very long stick. This house is entirely sustainable. It's built out of sustainably harvested wood from forests that are certified. This is a conical roof clad in solar panels and it also produces more energy than it will ever consume in the lifespan of about 100 to 300 years. It harvests all the solar energy that we need to run the house and it collects also rainwater for a swimming pond. Let me show you inside. So here we're in the mudroom which has seven foot four high ceilings and then it slowly gets narrower and then it gets wider and wider all the way to the main space which has in the tip there a 22 foot ceiling. The sunken living room was one of these pandemic additions. Out of curiosity I took a pickaxe one night and to check how deep the bedrock is and found out that it was about four feet. This sunken living room has many ways of inhabiting it. Here I'm sitting probably the most upright and then we have these tetrahedron pillows that can serve as headrests. There is also the chance that you can go all the way down and lay flat onto the bedrock and it's a whole different experience and actually very cold right now, very comfortable. The rock is in the center but in a way the geometric center of the house that would be pretty much here. I think this is very important in this house that we wanted to not only make it look in a certain way but also function in a perfect way. Many moments, many days, many dinner parties start on this kitchen island. It really is the heart of the house. This curved kitchen is built by Jan Kremen, a carpenter from the Czech Republic. The transition to then a dining or a more formal sit-down is very fluid. It's in the same space. The space gets a little taller and here we have this rectangular table. A custom-made fireplace that I designed to come straight out of the ceiling. This triple glass is the maximum size that would fit in an ocean container. It came from Germany and it had like an inch on the bottom and on the top of the shipping container. The rock also has very different personalities. When you see it from down here it almost feels like in a neck or the kids call it ET because ET's face head looks very much like that. In a winter storm it feels you're inside a snow globe but also it has a little bit of an aquarium feeling. You can experience it very differently from one day to another, from one moment from one hour to the next. I hope the boulder likes the attention. Yeah, I think he was a little lonely for 12,000 years until we found him or he found us. So it's a glacial erratic that was dropped here about 12,000 years ago in the last ice age. The way these rocks fell is really how we found it. We like living with him and I think his trees are growing well, his moss is growing, so I think he's a happy boulder. This is my home office where I often sit and sketch. It also has the model of the house that we built. It shows you all the rooms, how they relate radial to the rock. So with each door to one of the spaces, Lorenzo's bedroom, laundry room, powder room, guest apartment, Kiki's bedroom, each door makes the main space three feet wider. And all the windows that look relatively wild have again something to do with the rock. We have 64 segments that built this house, 64 pizza slices as we call them. The house is the passstück between you and nature, where you really set the windows exactly where they help you to inhabit the interior in the most comfortable or most exciting way. When I sit here on my desk, I wanted to have the view through the window on my eye level. Same in my bedroom, we wanted the window very low to the ground in order to be able to sit on, but also to look outside. This led to a relatively wild layout from the outside that only makes sense once you inhabit the building inside. All of our projects in one way or another start in a sketchbook, models and sketchbooks. We're trying not to waste anything, so even the kitchen window here, which is a round window in the concrete wall, became the fire pit of the fireplace. This is my daughter's room. She has the view from her bed out to the east side, sunrise. She wanted a big desk, which can change as she expands her crafty projects. My client, in this case my daughter, was very happy with this design. Kiki shares the bathroom with her brother, Lorenzo. They also, at some point, they were like desiring an outdoor shower, and so I came up with the idea of getting a shower that is draining directly into the concrete slab, and it has a big window where they can open the window and they can shower pretty much with nature outside. This is my son, Lorenzo's room. He is the lucky one who got a window that is large enough that it becomes a door, so he can eventually escape and has his own little private garden out here. I wanted to have our bedrooms all facing east, so both kids have east exposure and our bedroom, and the guest apartment is more north-west facing. The bathroom is again a compressed space compared to the very tall bedroom, but then it has a nice little surprise that you can look down into the main space. You smell the coffee in the morning already, you can always call down and be connected to the main action in the house. We wanted the guests to also feel independent from us, so it's actually a guest apartment, and then we have a built-in couch. All these beams were prefabricated and engineered to actually build in a sofa that takes advantage of the structure itself, and it is high enough to be comfortable on the dining table. This is our Polaris stair that also has a handrail that points double functioning as a naked eye observatory, where you see Polaris at night. This explains the idea of the stair. This is the axis of the earth, so it's a 42 degree steep stair with a handrail that double functions as a naked eye observatory of the North Star. This is the guest's bedroom with a king-size bed and north exposure, and the skylight to the south. Here you can stargaze on this Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier chaise longue, and you can also open it up and look out into the sky. The roof is cone-shaped. We placed the roof in a way that the largest surface is exposed around four o'clock, the time when the grid is most used. So these shingles by SunStyle are three-foot squares. They're all overlapping, so it forms this kind of dragon scale, holds the water out, and each one of them produces about 80 watts. Altogether we produce 18,000 per year. The house uses about 8,000 kilowatt hours, so we have 10,000 extra for an electric car, and the rest we donate to the grid. Because we wanted cross ventilation to have as much natural air as possible, each façade has windows in it. So to contrast the curtain wall on the south side and part of the east, we continue with a very traditional barn material, board and batten façade. You can see already how the color is shifting. It's local pine that turns like a silverish gray. In my studio we try to live by this mantra that everything that we design connects individuals to each other, to themselves, and then to the cosmos. The cosmos can be nature directly around you, but it can also be the sun and various other star constellations, and the ocean if there is an ocean, or in our case here the rock, which is also all stardust in the end. Cosmic architecture goes back to thousands of years of architecture, where old temples, even very simple monuments, were aligned with usually the sun as the strongest force. After studying and traveling to many temples and monuments, I realized that it was time to incorporate this also into more regular architecture. So why could it not be in a house? That's the challenge and that's what sets some of this cosmic architecture apart from non-cosmic architecture, that you do have this goal to ultimately connect to something larger than what is directly around you. If a building can make you aware of this, I think it's amazing. I certainly am obsessed with geometry. We started stacking out the 50 by 50 square, and the first move was that we actually offset it by golden ratios. It's the proportion that appears in nature in many plants, but also in the human body. As an architect you're always looking forward, you're not just designing for who you are now, but you're designing for who you want to become. We built this house with the goal that it will hold a lifetime, maybe the lifetime of my kids, and hopefully even till the next ice age. This is the latest edition by my son, who turned 12, and he built this tree house with his friends. I helped them building the zip line and tested it also for its safety. It should be fine. Ready? That's my house!