Salt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners

Salt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - Facade, GardenSalt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - Garden, ForestSalt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - Windows, Glass, HandrailSalt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - GardenSalt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - More Images+ 6

Salt Point, United States

Text description provided by the architects. In brilliant daylight, the Salt Point House has an ethereal presence as elusive and weightless as a mirage, its edges seemingly dissolving into the surrounding forested landscape. Yet with changing light, the house transforms itself, shifting by turns from gossamer and nearly transparent to opaque and quietly monumental. Perhaps even more remarkable: the architecture achieves these poetic qualities with a modest palette of ordinary materials and simple volumes.

Salt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - Facade, Garden
© Scott Frances

In the most basic terms, the house is an open-ended, painted-cedar box, lined in maple plywood and overlaid on two sides with corrugated screens of perforated, stainless steel. Its brief could hardly have been more humble. The clients, a New York City couple, wistful for the key elements of their former weekend getaway—the rustic hunting shack they had once hoped to buy—wanted a small, comfortable, easily maintained, two-bedroom retreat with an open living area and a screened-in porch. Certainly, no exotic requirements, but in the sheer modesty and economic restraint of this commission, the architects found opportunity to distill form, proportion, materiality, and detail to their essence. Inspiration also came, abundantly, from the site—an idyllic clearing on a wooded, nine-acre parcel in New York’s Hudson Valley, along a pond that spills into a small waterfall.

Salt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - Garden, Forest
© Scott Frances

Outside, the rippled screens, veils of stainless steel, simultaneously hide and reveal, filtering readings out to the landscape and in to the structure’s pure volumes, its solids, shadows, and flickering voids. At once deep and lightly layered, both transparent and opaque, the perforated metal cloak registers muted reflections of the surroundings in seasonal flux. Even the screened-in porch is detailed with minimalist precision, as if simply delineating a great, cubic volume of air. This is an architecture that accepts yet transcends the sheer simplicity of the plywood box, expressing and dematerializing the skin as it quietly renders the prosaic sublime.

Salt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners - Windows, Glass, Handrail
© Scott Frances

Project gallery

See allShow less
About this office
Cite: "Salt Point House / Thomas Phifer and Partners" 14 Oct 2010. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/81621/salt-point-house-thomas-phifer> ISSN 0719-8884

© Scott Frances

盐点住宅 / Thomas Phifer

You've started following your first account!

Did you know?

You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.