House in Trillium Forest

2014  |  House in Trillium Forest  |  Durham, NC

This two-story, 7600 square foot, wood-framed house is located inside Durham’s Trillium Forest in a quiet, peaceful site surrounded by trees. The client’s desire for a connection to beauty of the natural world directed the design process from the onset. Accordingly, bringing nature into the house became a key design element. As realized, the conceptual design is rendered as a contemporary dialogue of pure form that compliments the surrounding environment. Its formal composition of white planes and volumes emphasizes rather than competes with the surrounding landscape. The building sits far from the road on a summit surrounded by a dense grove of trees and is composed of three, white stucco volumes interconnected by a glass and clad cedar gallery.

The central two-story volume contains the living room, kitchen and staircase organized in an open plan arrangement that invites the forest into the interior environment of the home. Expansive, floor to ceiling openings on three sides of the living room further enhance the connection to the outside. On the east, a painting studio detaches from the main house and is connected by a gallery that features display space for owner’s artwork. On the west, the two large master bedroom windows rise above the forest floor, framing views into the surrounding woods. A series of low limestone site walls and stairs shape the landscape around the building, merging the house with the topography, creating a variety of outdoor spaces: a garden with a koi-pond on the master suite side, an enclosed patio on the gallery side and a paved area with a meandering walkway on the front side.

In the owner’s words, the home offers a supremely reposeful setting of solitude, focused on the making of art, imbued with qualities of silence, beauty, nature and inner peace.

AWARDS
AIA North Carolina Merit Award, 2016

Photography by Michael Mills