RESIDENTIAL ESTATE
Thousand Islands
Clayton, New York

Guest House
1,000 SF

THE CLIENT The client is an energetic couple in their early 60s. They have grown children with families who visit frequently. The husband is a lawyer with an ongoing but less active practice. The wife has her own interior design business.

THE PROGRAM The long-term program includes a primary retirement residence with three bedrooms and a master bedroom suite to be organized around living spaces, taking advantage of the unique character of the site. The completed first phase includes preliminary sitework, the access drive and a 1,000 square foot guest house built initially so that the couple could live on the site during the planning and construction of the main residence. With regard to the plan organization and style, the client wanted modern structures with all the conveniences, but sought the warmth associated with traditional houses.

EXISTING CONDITIONS The thirty acre site is located in the Thousand Islands area of northern New York State. The extraordinary natural vegetation includes hundreds of arbor vitae, cedars, maples and specimen-quality trees of many types. The trees are layered in bands as the land gently slopes toward a fifty-foot palisade overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. The site includes several abandoned quarries, the smallest being located quite close to the river’s edge.

DESIGN SOLUTION The small quarry was chosen as the site for the guest house primarily because of its proximity to the cliff and the exhilarating view across the Saint Lawrence River into Canada. It was also agreed that this first structure should be built out of limestone. The choice of stone as the the major material determined the design strategy. Although the building is a conventionally veneered frame structure, the stone is detailed to express mass and solidity. The four functional requirements of bunkroom, kitchen, bathroom and laundry/storage are enclosed in small rooms located at the four corners of the 24-foot square central space. These rooms each have only two penetrations: an interior door for access and a small punched window for light and ventilation. As a result, the rooms read as large piers supporting the pyramidal roof at its four corners. The massive freestanding stone fireplace, chamfered an volumetric as well, is separated from the two adjacent corner rooms by glass doors and and clerestory windows that mirror the organization of the glass door/window wall facing the river. A wood framed deck, cantilevered toward the river, completes the promontory over the limestone palisade and river below. The asymmetrically pitched pyramidal roof, clad with handmade cementitious tile, is capped with its own pyramidal skylight providing top light to the 18-foot high volume it shelters.