Feature > An Exceptional Home for an Extraordinary Site
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By John Clayton | Photography by John W. Hesion
A dramatic landscape shapes an architect's design for a contemporary house in Hanover.
If architecture can be viewed as a marriage of art and science, then the marriage of Elizabeth and Michael Mayorshe a gifted multimedia artist, he a brilliant orthopedic surgeonwas destined to produce dream clients for some lucky architect.
Carol Wilson is that fortunate architect.
The dream project is near the foot of Moose Mountain in Hanover, and if ever there were a tangible testament to the benefits of a bond between an architect and her clients, it is here in this daringly sleek, ultramodern home.
It was a wonderful fit to have clients who spend their days dealing with both elemental aspects of architecture, Wilson says. Michael has that hard knowledge of structural systems and material strengthhes an engineer as well as a surgeonand Elizabeth has her artistic eye and vision. By embracing both points of viewthe artistic as well as the scientific they brought so much to the project. My only regret is that they live three hours from me, because I would love to spend more time with them.
To do that, Wilson would have to travel from her professional base in Falmouth, Maine, which is where a budding architect named Sloane (Mayor) Chambers was working on Wilsons staff some ten years ago.
Sloane, Elizabeth and Michaels daughter, persuaded her parents to place their trust and their spectacular tract of land in Wilsons hands.
That land that has been in the Mayors possession for more than forty years, but for most of that time, the only structure on the site was a rustic, timber-frame cabin perched on the shore of a pond.
We had been bringing our children from our home just a mile down the road on Occom Ridge and camping and swimming in the pond for many years, Michael says. The cabin was built on the site in the late 60s. It was one of Ed Levins first structures (Levin is a Hanover resident and nationally recognized authority on historical timber-frame techniques) and the pond is an extraordinary asset. The sum of it all is that we knew the land and we loved it.
Flowing with the landscape
That land helped shape Wilsons design. From the foot of the mountain, theres a steep slope that goes all the way down to the pond at the bottom of the hill, she says. So I had to find a way to have the house sit on the hill. The solution was to build the home perpendicular to the slope, and do so in such a way that all the water coming down the mountain in the springtime will go around the house and replenish the pond.
In a sense, the house runs down the mountain as well. At the top of the complex is a two-car garage. That utilitarian space angular, modern and stylish in its own rightis topped by soaring his-and-her work spaces. These airy, open studios offer panoramic views of the property. A ribbon-like pathway leads down to the house and ultimately down the slope of the mountain, culminating at a dock on the pond, yet another natural element that is carefully woven into the fabric of the Mayor home.
Inside is the open-concept living spaceliving room, kitchen and dining area, with enclosed bedrooms facing into the hillside.
A short, covered, outdoor walkway leads to a delightful, islandlike, three-season porchthink high-tech treehousethat is suspended twelve feet above the ground on steel legs.
Learning how clients live
The home is the product of great patience, as the architect and her clients engaged in painstaking planning.
I have a checklist I developed over the years that is a means of information gathering, Wilson says.
In essence, clients have what they think of as a program or brief, but I think the first step you take as an architect is helping them rewrite the brief and determining the way they will use the home.
Instead of their saying, I want three bedrooms, a living room and a dining room, I ask, Where do you like to eat In a dining room On a porch In an informal setting or a formal setting Where do you sleep On the couch in front of the television In a closed bedroom In light spaces or dark spaces
I try to get them thinking about the way they live, starting from ground zero. As that process goes on, its an opportunity to see if the project is going to be a good fit between the architect and the client, and this fit was wonderful.
With a whimsical working titlebecause of the site near the foot of Moose Mountain, Wilson dubbed this the Foot House the project evolved in concert with building contractor Timothy Estes from Estes & Gallup of Lyme.
Using materials right for the job
Its hard to describe the home by style or type, Wilson says. Its architecture thats about the material the house was built with, with concrete, glass, red cedar and steel from minimills, which is largely recycled content. The home is about the structural system that integrates the building with the site and is very much about the site, with the house facing south for reasons of heat and light.
Light abounds in the home, courtesy of strips of translucent Kalwall that are embedded in the ceilings. Kalwall, a product that was first manufactured in Manchester more than fifty years ago, features millions of prismatic glass fibers that refract sunshine and even overcast daylight in a balanced, diffuse wash of glare-free, usable light. This passive light source gracefully complements the spectacular floor-to-ceiling OSLO Windows made in Canada, chosen by Wilson because they act like a moving glass wall.
Looking out the windows, Elizabeth says with a laugh that houseplants are redundant. Because the outside is so gorgeous and so close, houseplants seem very small. The windows simply frame the outside, everywhere you look. Spoken like the artist that she is, Elizabeths woodcuts and prints are showcased at McGowan Fine Art in Concord. Elizabeth also finds great serenity in her fully windowed studio that sits on the homes upper level, side by side with her husbands wood shop.
I love all of the windows, and I love the polished concrete floors with the radiant heat, she says. You would never think of putting in wall-to-wall carpeting; we have area rugs in a few places, but the floor is easy to clean. I just love the look of it, and I love the high ceilings. I feel almost trapped when I find myself in a room with low ceilings now. Although we have a guest room in the basement, all of our living space is on one floor.
That proved to be of great benefit to her husband.
It is very accessible, he chuckles, emphasizing the word very. You can get anywhere you need to go, even if youre in a wheelchair. I tested that when I had my knee replaced.
That was a busmans holiday of sorts. Michael performed his first total-joint-replacement surgery thirty years ago and has done another three thousand similar procedures in the interim. At the moment, however, hes doing more teaching than operating. He is an emeritus professor of orthopedic surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon and serves as an adjunct professor of engineering at Dartmouths Thayer School of Engineering. It is the engineering hat he wears when he speaks so lovingly of his home.
Tools for an energy-efficient home
In spite of all the windows, he says, the home is thermally efficient because the roof has very high R-values and the walls all have foam-plate insulation within them. (The R-value measures the thermal resistance of a material to heat transfer. R-values are used to rate insulation products; the higher the R-value, the greater the insulations effectiveness.)
That foam-plate insulation is called Thermomass. Its poured concrete with a layer of insulation inside.
One of the prominent features in the main living and dining area is a massive Scandinavian masonry heater thats wood-fired, Michael explains. It gives me both inspiration and cause to do more of the wood work than I would be doing anywaymanaging a three-acre forest. So I cut, split and stack it by the fireplace to burn every night from October to March. It burns intensely for one to two hours with almost no residue, and so much of the heat is absorbed by the masonry that it is slowly released into the living space for the next twenty-four hours.
Open for the family
The Mayors children and grandchildren live nearby and call often. While the pond is a magnet, the clan eventually settles into the open-concept living and dining space.
When Sloane brought her parents to me, they looked at what I was doing and I knew it wasnt architecture they were accustomed to, Wilson says. But Sloane told them, You have to trust Carol. They did, and I think they felt in the end that the openness of the space was very liberating, just as its liberating to have people consider your work and make a leap of faith.
