"Big House Little House" 
Norwich Firm Mixes Innovation and Tradition In Designing Two Quite Different Homes
Donald Maurice Kreis
For the Valley News - March 4, 2006

NORWICH, Vermont - March 4 (Valley News) - Byron W. Haynes and R. Andrew Garthwaite are the myth-busters of the Upper Valley's architectural community.  For the past decade, their Norwich-based firm, Haynes & Garthwaite, has demonstrated that buildings designed in a traditional idiom can still be innovative, challenging and even suggestive of what the great homes of the future could be like.

  Two of the firm's recent residential projects in Vermont offer compelling examples, while themselves offering a contrast that busts another myth or two.  One home is a cottage on a hillside in Norwich, belying the notion that one has to spread out to live comfortably.  Another, on the shore of Lake Morey in Fairlee, is big enough to meet some people's definitions of a large house while showing that not every such project is a McMansion that conquers rather than respects its site. 

  First, to Norwich.  On one of the town's back roads, passing through rolling hills that once were forest, were then cleared as farmland, and today offer the idyllic landscape familiar to fans of Sabra Field prints, is a light green board-and-batten house that, from the road, looks no bigger than a postage stamp.  In terms of stylistic idiom, it speaks mostly the language of the 19th century Gothic Revival -- but with a sense of restraint as opposed to the frippery that typifies so many such homes and their latter-day variants.

  But, even before noticing the particular style of this cottage, a visitor sees how remarkably this home is situated in the landscape.  While most homes in such a location would dominate the site by occupying the most conspicuous, view-maximizing spot on the map, this house nestles modestly into a partially cleared woodlot next to a meadow.

  "Especially in the summer, it just kind of disappears," says Haynes, who lives in Norwich.  "We decided to maintain the pasture and not violate it."

  The clients, a Boston-based couple, wanted a weekend retreat that would be modest, yet still give them room to relax, entertain and have a grandchild or two for an overnight.  (They plan to build a larger home on the site and use the cottage as a guest house.)

  As one approaches the front door, one might expect to be entering a one-room cottage with a small front porch, a chimney suggesting a pleasant hearth and a dustpan dormer shedding some light on perhaps, an unfinished attic.

  Crossing the threshold of this home is to experience some of the disbelief visited upon the two children in Mary Poppins, who watch their new nanny open her small carpetbag and pull all sorts of preposterously huge things out of it.  There is an awful lot of home packed into a mere 1,200-square feet of house.

  Thus are the principal theme and underlying secret this house revealed:  Nearly every feature has multiple functions and is designed with flexibility at the forefront.  The openness of this plan -- kitchen flowing into the living room, which has a dining area within it -- follows the line to traditional Japanese architecture first drawn in the U.S. by Frank Lloyd Wright.

  The adjacent master bedroom is a festival of light thanks to a rectangular tower bay of windows.  The bay continues to the second story, adding harmony to the back façade while admitting tons of natural light to the finished attic, where the absence of gloom is even more welcome than it is below.  And, for all the flexibility and inventiveness of these spaces, the entire composition manages to remain a respectful homage to Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852), author of a famous pattern book that did as much as anything to spread exotic styles among Victorian-era cottages.

  Elegantly landscaped in a manner that creates an inviting, curved terrace and colored an inviting but subtle light green, this little house is a sly rebuke to those who would conquer these hills with new colonial-style farmhouses painted white.

  When the scene shifts to Lake Morey, one sees how Haynes & Garthwaite can create illusions as well as demolish them.  The house they designed there adopts the shingle style, a distinctive look that one associates with summer retreats in Newport, R.I., that were built a century ago during the Gilded Age.  Occupying the site of a former resort, dance hall, and casino, the 4,000-square-foot house actually reuses some of the materials from the building it replaced. 

  And yet, for all that, a visitor who didn't know better might think this a nearly pristine setting on which has been constructed a new home that, while not exactly modest, is nevertheless one that alighted with something like delicacy.  At the expense of privacy, both architects and owners resolved to site and landscape the house in a manner that shares more than a glimpse of the lake with passers-by (or, more likely, drivers-by).  There's also a good look at the lakeside red maple tree.

  To lessen the visual impact without sacrificing style or proportion, the architects specified a roofline that is 18 inches shorter than what the usual design conventions would have produced.  "It's just like pulling a hat down over your ears," laughs Haynes.

  The ultimate sign of non-ostentatiousness is the lack of exterior expression, at least toward the street, of the fact that the interior is built around what real estate fashion describes as a "great room."  Two story living rooms are as ubiquitous as adjustable-rate mortgages these days, and the Lake Morey house has one far greater than the average.  The side of the house facing the lake is, if anything, even more unpretentious.  Four glass doors beneath four clerestory windows admit light and lake view to the great room with abandon, but stand beneath an arched pediment calculated to make this feature look smaller than it is.  The effect is accentuated by the fact that this central part of the façade is flanked on either side by porches and, above, gabled projections containing bedrooms. 

  Although this project is more than three times the size of the Norwich project, the central living space at Lake Morey brings the same sense of care, innovation and flexibility to the main room that the architects used to design the smaller home.  (Citing the owners' request for privacy, the architects declined to furnish the building cost for either the cottage or the house on Lake Morey.)  At both residences, these adaptable, flowing space are the central organizing principle.  Upon entering the house, a visitor is greeted not by the lake view but by the back of the stone fireplace.  One can walk to either side of the stonework to arrive in the great room and its lake panorama -- an unfolding interior drama that again suggests affinities with Frank Lloyd Wright.  Coffered ceilings above and Doric columns at the perimeter to strength and order, with the columns substituting for walls as structural support, thus creating an open plan that would have shocked the Gilded Age aristocrats but pleases us today.

  It is endearing that in an era in which public rhetoric about residential design insists that small is beautiful, Haynes can express pride in an expansive design because only the exterior strives for understatement.  "The fact that the rooms flow together makes it seem larger than it really is," he reports.

  "This is the 'guy room,' " announces Haynes as he shows a visitor the adjoining den, a mahogany-paneled room featuring a chandelier made from antlers.  In such a space one could imagine William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt sharing a cigar and resolving their differences.  But even this room, for all its opulence, respectfully dissents from unalloyed robber-baronism:  The fireplace is made from bricks recycled from the casino that once occupied the site. 

  Robert Stern, who designed the opulent library building at the St. Paul's School in Concord, is the most famous American architect associated with traditional and historicist buildings.  A key to understanding Byron Haynes and Andrew Garthwaite is that Stern, though a fine architect, is not the Haynes & Garthwaite avatar. 

  Garthwaite, who lives in Lebanon, studied with Vincent Scully, the provocative Yale University architectural historian who (among other things) first popularized the term "shingle style" in the 1950s while promoting its resurrection.  Haynes learned about architecture from Peter Eisenman and Henry Cobb.  Eisenman is famous for seeking an architecture that expresses the deconstructionism espoused by the late philosopher Jacques Derrida.  Cobb is a partner of I.M. Pei and the architect of the Hancock Tower in Boston and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.  Having Haynes and Garthwaite working together in the same studio -- behind Dan and Whit's in Norwich -- makes for an eclectic and fertile mixture of influences.

  What emerges has impressed the awards jury of the American Institute of Architects' Vermont chapter, which in 2003 gave an honor award to the Norwich cottage.  It has produced happy clients, who salute the architects' ability to listen to and collaborate with people looking to build their dream home.  But it also confers upon them a special responsibility in a region where architectural taste runs to the conservative.  Catering to that taste without pandering to it, and thus stealthily introducing innovation and creativity to the local design residential vocabulary -- these are the reason to keep an eye on this little firm. 

Kreis, Donald. (4 March 2006)  Big House Little House.  Valley News, pp. C1-C2.