Millbrook House by Thomas Phifer and Partners

Architects: Thomas Phifer and Partners
Location:Millbrook, New York, USA
Year: 2010
Photo courtesy: Thomas Phifer and Partners
Description:

The trip of landing in the Millbrook House is an unhurried climb, concentrated on encountering and re-encountering the area. On this 200-section of land site, a structural engineering of discrete geometric items set inside of a courageous scene choreographs the course, interceding an unraveling succession of limits and perspectives. Up a meandering drive, through a timberland to a little, rock auto stop, the methodology movements to a pathway, ascending along a slope’s edge. In soul, the movement reviews the apparently wandering, yet deftly organized way to an Ancient Greek sanctuary, drawing in the guest with a scene held significantly more holy than the building itself.

At Millbrook, the first look of fabricated structure is a cantilevered, weathering-steel box, the guesthouse, floating over an edge of the auto park. Dark red, patinated steel boards shape a holding divider, stretching out from underneath the studio straight up slope, ascending with the consistent cadence of metal plates adjacent to bluestone treads, set into the incline like venturing stones on a pool of water.The climb achieves the slope’s peak, a green projection, flanked by a rectangular glass structure along one side and, on the inverse edge, a progression of four low, mahogany-sheathed volumes—as unadulterated and refined in their geometric redundancy as a Minimalist figure.

This course of action around the clearing edges long, perspectival perspectives of the Hudson Valley, reminiscent of the vista-catching motions of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia and Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute.The glass structure at Millbrook sits so daintily and with such straightforwardness that its floor appears to stream continuous from the encompassing rug of garden. Once you’ve crossed the edge, into the living-feasting kitchen space, full all encompassing perspectives open up, significantly and in all directions.This clear volume plays against the wood-clad stone monuments, austere from the methodology, their dark, mahogany shells reverberating the rich, gritty shades of the weathered steel.

Despite the fact that apparently unsupported, the structure and its wood partners all associate inside, underneath the green region. Every mahogany box, somewhat installed in the inclining territory, frames a private lodge for dozing and washing, entered one level underneath the glass structure. As though rising up out of the earth, these high-ceilinged lodges have a cozy compatibility with the scene. In counterpoint to the outwardly extensive peak roost, they open just eastbound, to the morning sun, each to its own particular bamboo garden and the glades past.

Your view of the house and site advance: not just as you cross the area, but rather additionally as you travel through the inside, from excellent common to calmer private zones. Outside, the experience crescendos as you peak the slope and venture over the high garden. In any case, just when you wander into the glass structure does the adventure achieve its peak, from contained space opening to the boundlessness of the landscape.