Southfield Store

When we went looking for land, we had a destination in mind. For years, we had been spending our weekends in Litchfield, Connecticut. Every Friday, we’d pack up the car in New York and drive a couple of hours north to an unparalleled piece of property just outside of town. To be exact, we rented a house on a 1,200 acre estate that was ours for the rambling. The only trouble was that we didn’t own it. For a long time, that didn’t matter to us. The owners were hardly ever there, and we had free run of one of the most spectacular places to live in New England. For various reasons, replicating this experience on our own was impossible. But two things were imperative as we began our search — enough land to spread out on and enough culture to keep us going on the weekends.

So here’s a sampler of what you’ll find within striking distance of our new home. The Southfield Store for meeting up with neighbors and a bite. Cafe Adam for fine and friendly dining. Butternut Mountain for a kitschy take on downhill skiing. Bear Mountain for leaving the rest of the world behind. The magical gardens at Ashintully. The Appalachian Trail for x-county traipsing. Tanglewood for classical day dreams. Club Helsinki for folk and blues. Yale Music School for summer lazing. The Stockbridge Bowl for sailing. The Route 7 Grill for smoking hot food. The porch of the Red Lion Inn for G&Ts in August. And that’s just for starters…

The front of the house is designed to take in a long view of forest and distant mountains through a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows.  On each side of the house, there will be a deck — one for me and my husband, and the other for our guests.  In between, there is a long stretch of great room and kitchen to walk through before you get to to the Master Bedroom and office. And upstairs, two lofty bedrooms and full bath for guests.  All this in less than 2,500 square feet of space.  Simply perfect!

House model

My husband and I work in advertising — so like architects, we work with clients who give us a brief and a budget. Having already provided our architects with a brief and a budget for our house, we were both really looking forward to being on the other side of the table for once.

We arranged to meet with the architects at my husband’s office in New York. When they arrived, they set a large box down on the table. My husband and I waited expectantly. The wife began their presentation by saying that our project was the firm’s favorite. My husband squeezed my hand, smiling. “So what’s in the box?” he asked. “Your house,” they answered.

And with that, the architects removed the lid from the box and lifted out a three-dimensional model of our house — or houses I should say. We were awe struck. “Wow,” I said. “I’m amazed.” The architects beamed. “It’s great,” said my husband. We were looking at a large house and a small house — both with long sloping roofs and lots of glass. The large house was connected to the smaller house by a wooden deck. The design was not dissimilar to that of the Glide House — except that it was taller with a loft in the back.

Everything about it had been designed with our site in mind. There were “light catchers” on the roof — mini, south-facing windows that would channel light down into the interior of the house. And set into the the south side of the house were panels of Kalwall — a translucent, highly insulated type of wall that would let in diffuse light from the south. And everywhere, there were windows.

“So what do you think?” asked the architects. “It’s phenomenal.” we said. As the discussion turned to our budget,  we realized it would not be possible to proceed with both houses at this stage of the game. But should we ever win the lottery, we plan to build the second one as well.

For several weeks, we scoured the online portfolios of architects in the Berkshires. Most of them seemed to be into designing McMansions masquerading as New England Salt Boxes. What we wanted was something that would fit in with the local architecture without being too conformist. After we’d narrowed down our options, my husband made a few calls. And after a couple of discussions, we settled on a husband-and-wife team from Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Our first meeting with the architects took place on our property. Most of our initial discussion centered around the difficult lighting situation — and our budget. My husband had made it quite clear before our meeting that we were on a strict budget that couldn’t be expanded. The architects told us that as long as we understood that we would be building a very small house, they would be willing to work with us. And so the deal was sealed.

Before parting, the architects told us to give them a wish list. Here’s an excerpt: “Although we love having guests, privacy is paramount. In fact, if money wasn’t an issue, we would happily build two houses — one for us and the other for everyone else. Aesthetics is another priority — we want something as beautiful as it is practical. Green engineering is a given, as are materials that are low on maintenance.”

We agreed to review their first take of our house about a month later. And what a very big surprise it would turn out to be.

In the end, it was the warm glow of the LVL at night that drew me in like a moth to Rocio’s website. Everywhere I clicked there were luminous pictures of her long gleaming beauties. I became hooked on her concept, visiting her site at every chance I could get, phoning my husband at work to gush over yet another one of her client testimonials.

Finally, we got our chance to see a Rocio Romero home up close after signing up for a tour of a just completed house near Rhinebeck, New York. It was everything we’d read about — light-filled, modern, breathtaking. And yet for all its advantages, we finally had to reject the LVL for the same reason we’d had to abandon our post-and-beam Yankee Barn: a design that was not able to let in enough light from the south. The only choice left was to give up once and for all — or find an architect.

Our Site

About a year ago, my husband and I were walking around our house site with a friend of ours who also happens to be a builder. We were talking about where to site the house — a post-and-beam style barn home we’d designed with the help of Yankee Barn — when the builder mentioned that we might have to think about taking out a lot more trees. “Why?” I asked, looking around at all the beautiful birches and towering pines that lined the edge of the acre we’d already cleared. “Because otherwise your house is going to cast a shadow over everything. Your entire yard will be dark.”

Huh. This was not something we had ever even thought about. So far, all of our attention had been on the interior of our house — the crisscross of roof beams overhead, the placement of the bedrooms, the open loft upstairs, the type of hardwood for the floors. In my imagination, the windows had always overlooked a yard dappled with light — certainly not a gloomy expanse of shadowy meadow.

The problem turned out to be the height of the barn and the alignment of our property along the east-west axis. With a north-facing house, a height of two stories, and a slope in the back, no light from the south would ever be able to reach the cleared area at the front of our house. And that was a problem — especially for two people who had spent over five years living in the shadowy confines of a pre-war apartment in New York City.

The red barn we’d spent so much time designing now seemed dark and spooky. The project which had taken up so much of our imagination now seemed doomed forever. For the first time, my husband and I talked about throwing in the towel. We started thinking about all the things we could do with the money we would save by not building a house. Trips to the south of France. Designer wardrobes. Alms for the poor.

Hope came in the form of Dwell Magazine. Pages and pages of sleek modern houses made of steel and glass. Each and every one of them flooded with light and possibility. And one in particular that seemed to offer everything the Yankee Barn did not. A long metal rectangle called the LVL from Rocio Romero.

Umpachene Falls

In the Berkshires, there is a lot of water. In fact, everywhere you look, there are lakes and rivers teeming with wildlife. So naturally, it never occurred to me or my husband that we might come up dry when it came to drillling our well. However, putting in our well turned out to be one of the most emotionally – and financially – draining experiences of our entire land-prepping saga. Mostly because we had no idea of the guesswork involved.

Massachusetts is renowned for its ledge, otherwise know as bedrock. In the old days, when farmers used creaky old hand drills to create wells, the very act of drilling created fissures in the bedrock. This is important, because the only way to get water flowing in a well drilled through bedrock is through cracks in the bedrock. However, today’s high-speed drills are often too efficient for the job. So instead of leaving tiny fissures in their wake, they virtually seal the walls of the well as they bore their way through the rock.

Campbell Falls

Our well was drilled by two affable brothers who own one of the most reputable drilling operations in our area. After doing our homework, my husband and I figured our well would cost about $7000. This figure was based on an average well depth of 300 feet and a cost per drilled foot of $25. Prior to our first meeting with the brothers, we had selected a site for the well that seemed reasonable in terms of the proposed location of our house and our septic.

However, when we walked the two brothers up the hill to the proposed site for our well, they didn’t seem very impressed. While one brother scraped around the ground for a few minutes with the end of a stick, the other brother looked at my husband and shook his head. “No good,” he said. “Yeah,” the other brother said. “There’s just a little bit too much ledge up here.” So down the hill we walked, following the two brothers as they scouted around the lower edge of our property.

“Have you ever used a dowser?” my husband asked at one point during this trek. “Nope. Don’t believe in that kind of stuff.” Finally, the four of us settled on a patch of scrub just off the end of our driveway. “This is it,” the older brother said. “Yep, this is as good a place as any.”

The drilling commenced the following day. I was at home when one of the brothers called to let me know that our well was coming up dry at 400 feet. “What should we do?” I asked my husband. He shrugged. Both of us were clueless as what to do next. But since we were already “in the hole” so to speak, and since the brothers assured us that they’d never had to go deeper than 600 feet, we took a deep breath and told them to keep on drilling.

Our well.

800 feet later there was still no water. “What should we do?” I asked my husband, this time in a state of shock. “I don’t know.” In the end we called Tom who called a friend of his who was a dowser. The dowser said there was a huge vein of water only a few feet from our well. Tom and the dowser recommended hydrofracturing. The brothers said that was hogwash and recommended finding another place to drill. But after almost $20,000, this did not seem like a very smart thing to do. Though it was a bit of a gamble, we decided to blast the walls of our well. And now we have an 800-foot well with a healthy pressure of 10 gallons a minute.

After traipsing around the property several times over the course of a couple of weekends, we settled on a house site about 800 feet in from the road. Our property is a very long, narrow rectangle – about 250 feet wide and about 1600 feet long. Once built, the house would be almost dead center in the middle of our land, facing north towards the long edge of our lot. A rough-and-tumble stone wall marked the eastern edge of our house site, and up the slope to the south, a tall stand of eastern white pines.

Now for the driveway. Thanks to our realtor, we had already been introduced to a young excavator from the area named Tom. For two neophytes like my husband and me, meeting Tom was a real stroke of luck. Gregarious yet thoughtful, Tom viewed land the same way a painter views a canvas. As we lumbered after him through the endless bramble of weeds and brush that led to the site, he pointed out all the features of our land that we had never really noticed. Even better was how he talked about these things in the context of our driveway.

“That stand of hemlocks will look beautiful in the winter,” he pointed out, describing how the driveway would curve past various trees worth saving. “And those boulders can be moved to help frame your view of the Taconic Mountains in the distance.” Actually, I’d never really thought about all the thought that could go into a driveway. And that was only the beginning of all the things we would have to think about.

The driveway took about four months to finish. As we had agreed, Tom had designed it to look as much like an old track as possible. The first time we walked its total length, we were in awe. No sound save that of our own footsteps on the ground and the cry of a hawk far above. And nobody else but ourselves to answer to as we forged ahead with our plans.

Our first barn plan

Once we had the land, my husband and I began to think about the kind of house we wanted to build. Three years of house hunting had definitely helped us refine our sensibilities. We envisioned a place that could provide the two of us with the privacy we relished, while accomodating weekend guests and visiting children. We also needed a design that could house an eclectic collection of furniture and art both inherited and bought, European and Asian, yard-sale kitsch and cosmopolitan. After much deliberation, we decided to visit the headquarters of Yankee Barn in New Hampshire. We were very impressed with the quality of the model home they showed us, and later took them up on an offer to stay overnight at just completed Yankee Barn in Brandywine, Pennsylvania. After that weekend trip to Pennsylvania, we decided that a Yankee Barn was just what we wanted. A few weeks later, we met with a designer, described our vision, and within a few months, we had our own custom plans in hand.

For most of my life, I was a renter. But not just any renter. My first rental was in a high-rise building in Hong Kong. I was 26 years old, and it was my first apartment ever. It had three bedrooms, a big kitchen, two bathrooms, and a living room that overlooked a schoolyard filled with flame trees and white-feathered cockatoos.

My second rental was a rambling two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that I sublet from a friend of my father’s for a song. It was in a prewar building smack in the middle of town, with a gorgeous courtyard garden, and some of New York’s best restaurants just around the corner. Next came an apartment in Boston’s Beacon Hill, where I counted the Mayor and other local luminaries among my neighbors.

But by far the most killer rental of all was a house I found on 1,200 acres in Litchfield, Connecticut. What a place that was! Purportedly built for the Marharishi Mahesh Yogi back in the 70s, this glass-walled wonder was surrounded by fields of yellow daffodils that stretched as far as the eye could see, with miles of idyllic trails to follow through forests rife with wildlife, and three lovely lakes to ponder.

Then came my husband. After nearly 15 years of renting, he managed to convince me that the time had come to buy. So off we went on a wild house chase. First there was the 1700′s cape just across the street from the white-steepled church where we were married. Then there was the ramshackle house on six acres, replete with its own stream and vegetable patch, but not much of anything else. And so on it went, one house after another, always with something to love and always with something to hate, but never with exactly what we needed to want to make it ours.

Finally, we decided a ready-built house just wasn’t in the cards for us. So after three years of house hunting, we went looking for land. God knows why our realtor stuck with us for so long. It’s not like we were ever going to make him any money. But for some reason, he kept up the search. And now, thanks to his fortitude, we own a remote 10-acre swath of forest up in the Berkshires.