Designed by nArchitects, CLT House is a lake house built almost entirely from exposed cross-laminated timber, scaled down from an unbuilt 2008 scheme.
The Hudson Valley has long drawn New Yorkers north for the weekend house, a typology that runs from the modernist glass pavilion to the restored clapboard farmhouse. Near Rhinebeck, in Dutchess County, CLT House works this lineage in cross-laminated timber: a holiday home that Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, founders of Brooklyn studio nArchitects, designed for themselves and their two teenage children. It emerges from a clearing on a 3.2-hectare lakefront site as an irregular two-storey box, set 61 metres back from the water.
In effect the house is the studio testing its own arguments at domestic scale, and Bunge and Hoang set out to keep it light on the site and to let the timber organise the plan rather than merely clad it. The plan carries a longer history than the building itself. The project is an adaptation of an unbuilt project nArchitects originally drew in 2008 for Ordos 100, the Ai Weiwei-curated development in Inner Mongolia that never left the drawing board. While the first version was 929 square metres, this one is a fraction of it at 204.
The plus-shaped upper floor and the square, slightly askew ground level a key design features maintain from the original. Walls, floors and roof are all in cross-laminated timber, left exposed throughout in what the studio frames as a monolithic use of the material. The panels sit on a concrete foundation – the one carbon-heavy element the timber structure doesn’t displace – and went up in eleven days, a speed of assembly that comes with prefabrication. Inside, the timber is the finish: no plasterboard, the grain reading as wall and ceiling across a continuous surface.
Externally, the house is wrapped in waney-edge cedar boards, the live-edge siding that nArchitects traces to early American settler building. Left untreated to weather on its own terms, it will continue to silver unevenly over time depending on which way a wall faces and how much canopy sits above it.
The social rooms are on the ground level, living, dining and kitchen. It’s one continuous space wrapping a central core, opening to the lake and forest through large windows and sliding glass doors. Above, three bedrooms, a study and a bathroom occupy the plus-shaped floor, each arm open to the level below. Skylights lined with mirror punctuate three of the corners, throwing both direct and reflected daylight down through the house across the day. Against the pale timber the studio has set harder notes: a bright green steel stair, speckled black-and-white terrazzo in the downstairs bathroom, a wall of mesh rope overlooking the ground floor.
The house runs on geothermal wells paired with a radiant floor for heating and cooling, alongside a roof-mounted solar array that, by the studio’s account, produces more electricity than the household draws day to day. The landscape work is quieter: trees removed during construction were replaced with a wider range of species, and invasive aquatic plants were cleared from the lake to lift its water quality.
CLT House reads as a self-commission put to work: a second home that doubles as proof of the ideas the studio experiments with, scaled down from a speculative past and built to weather in the open.
Photography is by Michael Moran of OTTO.
Project credits:
Architect: nArchitects
Structural engineer: Silman
MEP engineer: OLA
General contractor: UCE Fine Builders
Civil engineer: TM DePuy Engineering
Metal fabricator: 4th State Metals
