This two-story 7,600-square-foot, wood-framed house is located inside Durham’s Trillium Forest neighborhood on a quiet, peaceful site surrounded by trees. From the beginning, the client’s desire for a connection to beauty of the natural world directed the design process, and nature became a key design element. As realized, the conceptual design is rendered as a contemporary dialogue of pure form that compliments the surrounding environment. Its formal composition of white planes and volumes emphasizes rather than competes with the surrounding landscape.
The house sits far from the road on a summit surrounded by a dense grove of trees and is composed of three white stucco volumes connected by a glass and clad cedar gallery. The central two-story volume contains the living room, kitchen and staircase, spaces organized in an open plan arrangement that invites the forest into the interior environment of the home. Expansive, floor to ceiling openings on three sides of the living room further enhance the connection to the outside. On the east side of the house, a painting studio is detached in form, yet connected to the main house by a gallery that features display space for owner’s artwork. On the west, the two large master bedroom windows rise above the forest floor, framing views into the surrounding woods. A series of low limestone site walls and stairs shape the landscape around the building, merging the house with the topography and creating a variety of outdoor spaces: a garden with a koi pond on the master suite side, an enclosed patio on the gallery side and a paved area with a meandering walkway on the front side.
In the owner’s words, the home offers a “supremely reposeful setting of solitude, focused on the making of art, imbued with qualities of silence, beauty, nature and inner peace.”
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