“Opportunities to salvage materials gave birth to a custom system of panelized infill between ceiling joists. At once ancient in its textile tectonic pattern language and its human scale.”

A landmark Design-Build project for Bryan Jones prior to forming Skyplane Studio Architects, you might say it both laid the runway for Skyplane to take flight and became a tarmac to return home.

A fabled construction project between a young architecture graduate and his father, the project remains a salient experience in Design-Build and a seminal work to test and expand ideas of custom and vernacular architecture. Completed in 2020, the house is composed with Fibonacci proportions and stretches outwards, well balanced, like a bird taking flight from a ledge outcropping. Both grounded to the limestone ledge and suspended in the imagination, as a dramatic “transitional” structure, borrowing from early American and Modern architecture alike, the house becomes a notable example of regional “place-based” design.

The aim of the project was to create a “timeless” piece of architecture that engenders both strong feeling of Romanticism and nostalgia of place while celebrating the simplicity of contemporary details and construction techniques - many of which were utilized to support the specific goal of “self-building” by the owner. Among the innovative construction methods of the time, circa early 2,000’s, the building features ICF’s for its basement level, a CMU core for the tower and chimney, and custom steel gusset plates to cantilever the porch from foundation walls and steel pilotis.

Firmly rooted in Champlain Valley’s second A-Horizon (Limestone), the home utilizes limestone quarried from the site throughout the design. Processed with a stone saw and hand tools by a young Bryan Jones, the local stone clads the aspiring and balanced vertical elements (tower, chimney, and fireplace) to anchor the building with a sense of permanence and monumentality. From these structures, the core of New England architecture (wood heat and congregation around fireplaces and cozy spaces) inspires the focal point of the residence and its communal spaces (the wood stove, outdoor fireplace, and lofted reading room in the tower - being a fireplace you can inhabit, cantilevered from the weight of the stone mast structures.

The quarried limestone stretches gently into the landscape, beginning as a low, elegantly curved, retaining wall leads to the entry, and to other paths, and a northern staircase that stiches the building to the site, passing gently between the remaining limestone ledge, seamlessly connecting exterior communal spaces, patio, lower lawn, and upper lawn gardens through the seasons.

A reference book in Design-Build for Skyplane, place-based, and custom architecture, visits with family each season offer moments to reconnect and reflect upon the many lessons the building built within the maker.

Project Team