Brevard House

Year: 2024 Design & Honor Awards | Category: Residential Over $1 Million

The house sits on a small outcropping midway up a mountain just outside of Brevard, NC. Surrounded by undisturbed mature growth forests, the clients wanted to build a house that had minimal impact on the land and one that deferred to it’s native surroundings. Blurring the line between habitable space and natural environment, the house is divided into two living ‘bars’ which are connected by an axial circulation spine that runs through the site. The exterior palette of the house includes elemental materials which are intended to weather over time, further merging it with its natural surroundings.

Design Challenge

Our clients communicated three experiential preferences at the outset of the project: to separate the main living areas from the kid’s areas, to orient towards the two prominent view corridors, and to design the master bedroom so that it felt immersed in the landscape. With these prompts in mind, we devised a layout with the main living and master bedroom program located in one form and the guest and kid’s bedrooms in a separate form. We then pulled these forms apart and torqued them, creating an internal courtyard that opens to the southwest view. We shifted the forms slightly in opposite directions to create a degree of privacy and autonomy for the guest wing and to cantilever the master bedroom over a steep topographical drop-off, creating the desired effect of the bedroom feeling suspended in the trees.

Movement through all interior and exterior spaces is subtly orchestrated with a spine of circulation marked by a continuous nine-foot cast-in-place concrete wall. The wall becomes the predominant organizing element in the design: extending to welcome visitors at the parking area, moving through the interior of the house, and continuing out to the rear yard. This axial feature, while clearly man-made, blurs the distinctions between interior and exterior spaces by existing continuously in both, visible throughout the property. The front façade design was determined by the typology of spaces on the interior side of the wall, whereby the exterior rhythm and composition of the bays transmit the function on the interior.

Firm
Point Office Architecture & Design

Project Location
Brevard, North Carolina

Completion Date
11/1/2022

Architects and Designers
Clark Tate, AIA; Principal in Charge
Mathew Weaver, AIA; Principal

Structural Engineer
Shear Structural

General Contractor
Wheelhouse Builders

Photographer
Michael Blevins/MB Productions NC