Shenandoah House

Situated on the slopes of the Allegheny Mountains in Virginia, Shenandoah House is a residence and a writer’s retreat of an anthropologist and a playwright. Morphing into the Appalachian landscape, the house celebrates its surroundings through its soft forms, curated views, and careful attention to energy use.

Like a series of small individual huts, rooms hinge from a single corridor, alternating between uphill and downhill sides of the site. This alternating organization embeds one side of the house into the hillside, while the other side perches atop the ridge, overlooking the sloping meadow and mountains beyond. Each room enjoys uninterrupted views of the landscape from at least three sides, while the intimate pocket gardens in between offer exterior living spaces and privacy to each room. From one of the pockets, a deck spills down the hillside to create a small amphitheater for informal per­formances. Another is occupied by a vegetable garden. The deliberate layering of the interior and the exterior dissolves the demarcation between the two, orchestrat­ing the interplay of various elements throughout.

Articulated by the organization of the rooms below, the softened roofline creates a lofted terrain that echoes the rolling mountain range. Inside, the ceiling follows the roof geometry, resulting in vaulted rooms and sculptural intersections where the roofline transitions along the corridor spine. Techniques of self-shading, efficient me­chanical equipment and insulation, and passive cooling from cross-ventilation help the house meet low-ener­gy use targets. Despite the modesty of each element, the expression of the house emerges in the interplay between its components and its harmo­nious alignment with the surrounding landscape.

(With SCHAUM/SHIEH)