AERIE SITE

This site is an example of a remarkable long-term collaboration between client, architect, and landscape architect. Prior to siting the house the clients periodically lived on the property for several years – in a tent. This ancient practice, involving careful study of sun and shadow, wind and rain and stars, over the course of the seasons, is rare today.

Following this period of study, the clients hired architects Suyama Peterson Deguchi to design a house, guest house and water feature on the former tent site. As the buildings neared completion Alchemie was hired, initially to create an entry walk between the parking area and the house, to design a functional path from the courtyard to the basement mechanical room, and to heal site wounds created by the construction. The creation of the entry walk involved careful site observation, a modest knowledge of surfical geology, and great good fortune.

In studying the dip and strike (angle and direction) of adjacent bedrock outcrops, and poking around through two to four feet of soil and construction gravel with a pry bar, it was determined that a glacial-polished bedrock shield lay beneath the overburden. This was removed to reveal an extraordinary bedrock ramp extending from parking area to poolside. Pockets in this ramp were then planted, and additional “glacial erratics” were then placed upon its surface.

Other landscape “improvements” were carried out with equal subtlety. A functional path from poolside to the basement mechanical room was created by extending an existing ravine, exposing more of an adjacent bedrock cliff, building a dry stream bed (whose boulders serve as a functional staircase), and covering the fill material against the house with scree, moss, and rotting logs.

Additional “glacial erratics” were placed around the buildings, on the terraces, and adjacent to pathways, in order to further tuck the buildings into the site and to gently direct circulation around the buildings. Several of these boulders, some in excess of twenty thousand pounds, were placed within inches of the buildings and under the eaves.

A very limited palette of native plant materials – shore pine, vine maple, salal, and mosses gathered on site – were used, in conjunction with the creation of additional rock outcrops, scree fields, and rotting log mulch, to complete a landscape which appears to have changed very little since its emergence from the last ice age, unimproved by human hands.