Inside A Floating House Hidden In The Woods

[illuminating music]

[Chan-li Lin] The way it achieves

the floating house effect

is really through engineering and structure.

What I find, you know, most exciting about architecture

is that it combines the technology of it,

which is the engineering side in the structural engineering;

and then you have the artistic side,

and at the same time, it's a place that you live in.

[vibraphone music]

My name is Chan-li Lin, I'm an architect.

This is our weekend house.

And Denise and I worked on this house together.

We worked on the house together, but we did kind of take

on our professional roles in the development of this house,

which meant that I had total veto power.

Yes, I draw. She bosses around architects.

I think it's a natural thing for most architects.

I think we do most of our work

for other people with other people's money.

I think we all want to do it once, at least,

to do a house or something for ourselves.

[Denise] It was Memorial Day weekend in 2009,

we were in Katonah, New York.

We had located that area because of all the lakes,

because of the commuting distance.

We walked into a real estate,

one of like five on the the main street there and said,

You know, we're looking for land.

And they kind of looked at us like we were crazy.

Within a week, it was clear that we weren't gonna find land.

That one, we could afford to build on or two,

was actually viable and buildable in that community.

The broker said, Well, maybe you wanna

consider a distressed property.

I think that's how he phrased it.

So we saw some burnt down house,

flooded house, houses with lots of problems,

but you could take on if you were willing.

And we found this property that

basically had not been lived in for about 15 years.

They had holes in the roof and animals living in it.

And for us, it was perfect.

[giggles] Yes.

[ethereal music]

Welcome to our home.

This is the north side of the house.

This is our main entry.

We are standing in front of the volume of our stair,

which connects the first and second floor.

You will notice the first floor

is much smaller than the second floor,

which cantilevers out both east and west.

As we walk to the entry, you'll see that we kept

the higher quality wood down below.

So you could really see up close,

the grain of the wood, as you're entering the house.

Doors, a very simple commercial grade front doors,

but we added this leather wrapping to the handle

so that in the winter it feels not so cold,

but it has a very nice, warm, tactile quality to it.

[door opening]

[Denise] He made this out of his belt.

[Chan-Li] Hey [Denise giggles]

[Denise] This is our entrance.

As you come in,

you can see straight through to the backyard here

and you can actually see straight through the bedroom.

The bedroom intentionally is one foot lower

than the main entry level,

partially to kind of root into the ground,

and partially to allow for the upper deck

to be lower than the living room.

So that when you look out sitting in the living room

you're not obstructed by railings.

[ethereal music]

We'll go into the other bedroom.

It's really no different than the other bedroom next door,

except for the view.

Here's really where we wanted to nestle this bedroom down

into this rock and fern garden outside, which is lovely.

And we had nothing to do with the design.

We really set the house within the existing context.

This was here and we fell in love with that landscape.

So this is the stair hall.

This is the second wall

that has literally two columns anchoring down.

I don't know many feet down, 10 feet feet? 20 feet?

[Chan-Li] About 10 feet. Yeah

[Denise] Down into bedrock.

And then if you come up the stairs,

part of the design of the house

was wanting to kind of always connect you

back to nature and to keep you oriented

as to where you were.

And you know, one reason for this window

looking down into the carport

is keeping you connected to nature and to the site.

And which is really what we fell in love with,

with the house.

This is our second floor.

And if you come off the stair and turn to the right,

which is turning to the east,

you will come into our dining room

[Chan-Li] Beyond here is all cantilevered.

We are basically above the carport

and looking over the backyard.

And if you come here and you're at the windows,

you know we have morning coffee here next to the windows,

the sun's coming in.

You really do feel like you're floating here.

From here, we'll walk west to the main living area.

This is our main living space.

We designed this very much to be casual, comfortable,

entertain friends.

You know, everybody's always in the kitchen

when you're entertaining.

So, this was designed in a way

that we could still be part of the party

when we're in the kitchen.

[Chan-Li] This is the main living space of the house

on the second floor.

And as you can see, it's a very casual,

open, social space for entertaining and relaxing.

Yeah. We have definitely more furniture

than needed, than the space deserves.

[Chan-Li] When we went to visit

one of the Neutra houses in LA,

what he did was to use a lot of mirrors to expand the space.

And that's one place we got an idea

to place mirrors in strategic places

so that the ceiling above us,

you know, feels like it extends.

Of course, you see the ceiling there,

but there's no slope ceiling beyond this wall.

But the mirror helps you visually trick your eye

and make the rooms appear much larger than it is.

[sliding door creaks]

Half the time during the summer and the warmer months,

yeah, it's great to be able to come in and out

through these doors and entertain,

or just relax inside and outside.

You can see how being elevated one floor here

is really a big plus here.

You're in all of the trees and surrounded by nature.

[ethereal music]

So if we come this way, we'll go into the primary bedroom,

which is really where we spend all of our time.

You've just crossed through the threshold

to being on the cantilever.

On the west side, you will see the western view.

It feels like you're floating again

Floor to ceiling windows, wall to wall.

And at the end of the cantilevers,

that really accentuates the fact that

you are above the ground floor by one floor.

[Denise] You can look back to the studio,

which is the addition we built: the studio garage.

The studio seems to be a one story structure there.

Because of the terrain, the garage is below grade

and built into the hillside.

All four of these pieces are from my uncle

who made furniture, was very handy,

was a great artist and used automotive paint,

actually, to make these these paintings.

So, which is good, because we get some intense sun

on the western side and the artwork doesn't suffer for it.

[ethereal music]

[Chan-Li] We studied multiple schemes

before we landed on the house that you just saw.

This was one of the first ones: we were trying

to save the original 1100 square foot house

that was here on the site.

But we went away from the idea

of saving that original house,

because no matter what you do to it,

it would be very much limited by

the small structural grid that it had.

And then we said, Okay, we're not gonna save the house.

We had this idea that, Well, if you really like

the second floor,

why don't we put everything on the second floor?

So, what we have here is a scheme that has

the same living room that you saw

and the kitchen and the master bedroom,

but two other bedrooms and a study

that is all elevated on the eastern end of the property.

With the Board of Health,

if we wanted to avoid a full-blown public hearing,

we could only relocate one bedroom,

One of the bedrooms, so

Upstairs, as opposed to all three.

Yeah, so in this case, all the bedrooms

that used to be on the ground floor,

like in this one, has to go upstairs.

And so we saw that as another challenge.

So this is pretty much what we built

with two bedrooms down below,

and one bedroom on one end,

dining room that you saw,

and living room, and a kitchen under the tall volume.

This model was built for me by an artist, Takeshi Miyakawa,

who is a very good friend of our ours.

And he brought it for me on my 50th birthday.

[Denise] What's not here and what wasn't here

with the original house is, again,

the garage studio that sits here.

You can see the terrain.

This really afforded us the opportunity, to kind of,

tuck the garage into the earth

and build the studio where we're sitting on the first floor.

So it really does align with

this first floor of the house.

And for the regulatory reasons,

we had to connect the two structures with covered walkway,

which I think is a very nice architectural touch.

It's almost Japanese in some ways.

[ethereal music]

What makes the floating aspect possible is a steel structure

and very significant foundation

that pins the steel structure into the ground,

so that the house is stable during the wind.

And what you don't see,

which we were very, very careful to do,

was to design a steel structure, in a way,

such that the members, steel members

are very, very small

and basically, disappears into what looks like

a conventional two by six walls.

If you look at the structural drawing of it,

this house is basically two parallel trusses

that are supported by very small foundations,

with two ends cantilevering from the foundation

about 20 feet on each end.

A good engineering makes things look easy

and that's what we are trying to achieve

with the design of the house.

Now, the biggest windows are here.

This is 33 feet long,

and it is a source of the most natural light;

it's facing directly south.

During the winter, the sun comes all the way back

into the back wall of the living room

and heats up the house.

In the summer, as you can see, no sun comes in.

So that's one main room and then,

bedroom faces west and the dining room faces east.

Each have completely different view

in the sunlight conditions.

We chose dark shade of color for the top, and it's black.

The idea was to make it look like it

blends into the shadow of the trees that we have here.

So that it doesn't really stand out.

It's not a huge house, but you can see

we have probably 18 chairs here

Too many

And we can comfortably

Okay, it's too many

Too many chairs.

We can comfortably entertain 20, 30 people easily.

And in that way, that connects outdoors in the terraces

to this big room, very seamlessly.

So I think for me, that's one of the best part of the house;

you're comfortable if you're alone

or you're comfortable with many of your friends

or you're comfortable with a bunch of furniture

that you collected over the years?

[both giggle]

Yes.

We actually have really appreciated,

especially you know, living in New York city

much of the time,

just the wildlife we have here: birds, fox, deer.

Supposedly we have bear;

we haven't seen those, but

Lucky.

[Denise] I think this house surprises people

because from the outside, it looks very modern.

Whether it's off-putting or intimidating to people

who have have an impression about what a modern house is,

I think once they come inside,

there's a level of warmth and comfort.

And I think that's from the materials

and the structuring of the light,

and certainly the surrounding trees and the woods coming in.

It's a dream house. I have many more.

[giggles] Yes. It's a great house.

It's a great house.

You know, we see the flaws

and what we could do better

because that's who we are.

And we're critics of every structure we ever see. But -

We've done very well with this house.

Yeah. We're very happy here.

It's definitely one of the dream houses.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say that.

More to come.

[ethereal music fades]