Residence at the Butte

View from the pond showing the translucent material.

Project details

• Project Name: Residence at the Butte
• Client: Patty Freeman-Martin and Gary Martin
• Project Type: Single Family Residence
• Principal Designer/s: Sander Architects
• Design Team: Whitney Sander, Principal Architect
• Contractor/s: Matthew Moore Construction
• Date of commencement of project: 2005
• Date of completion of project: 2006
• Location of site: Terrebone, Oregon, USA
• Site Area: 25 acres
• Built-up Area: 4, 500 sf
• Cost of Construction/Execution: $500, 000 (includes site work / bridge over stream)

The public side of the building is skinned in environmentally friendly metal panels to help guard privacy.

Words from the Architect

The clients are a couple who own 40 acres in Oregon where they run a business that offers state-of-the-art breeding services for cutting horses. The site encompasses a small lake, or pond, a view of a magnificent butte, Smith Rock and the distant mountains.

The existing residence on the property was a double-wide trailer and this quickly became too small as their son started to grow up.

At night the glowing building reflects in the pond.

One day, scanning an issue of Dwell, they noticed a house featured in the Houses We Love section - it was the Residence for a Sculptor project from Sander Architects. They fell in love. A phone call later they extracted a promise from the architect to come visit the site where he was inspired by the sheer beauty of the geography-and very touched to find the page from Dwell with his project posted on their fridge.

The wife is an artist and wanted a studio, they hoped to have privacy from the road where the arriving horse trailers would pass, taking advantage of the views would be important, they wanted plenty of space - and lots of sound separation for their son's budding passion for the drums.

Large windows capture the view.

Initial plans to build right over the top of the pond were scrapped, as the clients wanted some yard space on both sides of their house. Instead the design evolved as a long envelope with a roof that stepped to echo in form the nearby butte. One entire side of the house is translucent or transparent material (for the views) and the other side has a skin of overlapping rusted metal panels (providing privacy from the road) that again speak to the geology of the butte.

Credits

• Text: Catherine Holliss
• Photographs: Sharon Risedorph