Inside A Mansion Built On The Edge Of An Abandoned Quarry

[tranquil music]

I wanted to make sure that the materials, the palette,

the character of the house was responsive to the site.

It's not often that you're building

on top of a 40-foot-tall stone wall.

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Hi, I'm Steven Harris.

I am the architect of the Bedford Quarry House.

It is within an hour of New York

but it feels like you could be in Montana.

[lively music]

This was a functioning quarry, feldspar, rose quartz,

things of that sort.

The reason the quarry was abandoned

was because they hit water.

Many architects prefer working on nice flat buildable sites.

I'm much more interested in difficult sites.

I looked at it as this extraordinary geological opportunity

and the fact that it had so much water in it

and the vegetation in the trees were so beautiful.

When the owners found the site, there was a house on it.

It was a very different house, and to be charitable,

it had had a bit of deferred maintenance.

We started over.

We worked very hard to figure out

how the owner actually lives.

It's a young family, and we're figuring out the site

where the light is,

where the wind is, how things operate

over the course of the day

Almost 50 years ago, the man in the class ahead of mine

at Princeton had written a thesis called Psychoanalysis

at the place of arrival.

It was that the process of moving

from one condition to another, one can parse and divide

into stages what he referred to as a liminal condition.

That was one of the ambitions

for this house, taking from the approach.

You see a glimpse of where you're going to go

and a piece of the house, a kind of tease if you will.

Then you lose sight of it.

The road bends around.

It comes up, it rises.

You come back around to the backside

of the house and you're in a courtyard.

[tranquil music]

Then there was the stair that takes you down

to the main level.

Then as you come out onto the terrace,

as you approach that edge, you can see the water.

It is the space between things.

[tranquil music] [birds tweeting]

As you approach the house,

the one opening in these two walls

is where they intersect.

That brick wall conceptually

and literally slides through the building.

If you look carefully,

you'll see the garage, that's the top of the garage door.

It's a single pane garage door based on an airplane hanger.

You can see on both sides,

it's glass all the way through here.

This is conceptually a void.

The stair needed to be figurative.

It needed to be something which did not conform

to either geometry.

As you come down, you begin, for the first time,

to see the other side of the quarry.

Terrace is out here.

All of that, so you have a sense

that this is where the main public floor is.

In here then is the room

where I think they spend the vast majority of their time.

Like many younger families, it's got a great kitchen.

It's got a dining area, and it has a sitting area.

One of two ways

in which one talks about building on a sloping site.

The two ways you do it are the cave and the promontory.

So as we move from one condition to the other,

this end of the room is actually cozy, intimate

and then as you move farther in, it begins to reveal itself.

You see that promontory up there.

You see the little pathway that goes down to the dock

and this is the corner that is cantilevered over the edge.

So finally at this point,

you've got the waterfall, you've got the quarry.

You've got that incredibly beautiful sheer face,

almost like the Palisades on the other side.

So in some ways, it's a calibrated sequence

of reveal and of arrival.

[tranquil music] [water rushing]

I think it's very important

that architecture induce movement.

When every single room has the same view,

there's really no reason to move.

The interiors are relatively muted

and they're subtle little tropes,

like if you look at the lines in those rocks

and you look at the little lines in this rug,

there's this kind of reference that occurs there.

Obviously, this stone and that wall

bear some form of relationship.

There's also a little tiny balcony up here off of this side.

So if you have some friend who smokes cigars,

it's a place where you can stash him.

Another thing that we've increasingly done

is when you have an open kitchen

where everyone is hanging out,

I think it's important to have a back kitchen,

a part of the kitchen that is out of sight.

So looking over that way,

you'll see that there is a second sink, a lot of storage.

There are dishwashers back there

so you can have a nice meal, all of that

and then put all the aftermath

over there and deal with the tomorrow.

This can be divided off.

You can close off this room more

for acoustical reasons than for privacy.

This is then the media room, AKA the polka dot room.

It also happens to have a model of the house.

We are right about here now, so you can see

from this that the house is actually two boxes.

It's this box,

which was the garage that had the garage door that shut.

This is the slot that goes through that we came in on.

This is then the two story piece.

You could see the topography here

and how dramatic this thing drops away.

[tranquil music]

It goes back to Livy.

If you read Livy about where the bedrooms go

and where the public rooms go at a palazzo,

there's a whole passage about how the ground floor

is about fortification, the main floor, the piano nobile,

where all the public rooms are.

The bedrooms are above that.

I think subliminally, it has to do with protection.

This is in the primary bedroom, which has a not bad view,

the waterfall, the quarry, the far side.

One of the things we sometimes don't take enough thought to

is the kind of rituals of getting up in the morning,

getting dressed, going to bed at night,

packing a suitcase, all of that.

A place to toss your clothes in the evening

or to lay out what you're going to wear.

This is the primary bathroom,

which has too little chapels off of it,

one of which is the loo, the other of which is the shower.

I hate brushing my teeth and looking at myself

in the mirror, and I'd much rather stand here and look

at that waterfall as I brush my teeth than stare at myself.

Two closets.

I bet you that one's his.

This is above the fireplace

that's in the living room coming directly up.

This is also a sedum roof.

It's just coming back from the winter.

I think there's something magical

about the sound of that waterfall.

It eliminates every piece of stray sound you can hear.

This is the one place where you could look down

into that little courtyard.

That's the beginning of a trail that goes around.

All of the water comes back the other side,

has steps down to the water, the dock,

the boat, all of that.

As you may know, a lot of ponds

have little fountains in them and things like that.

That's to aerate the water

and to prevent algae growth and things of that sort.

In this case, we figured out another way of doing it,

or David Kelly did,

which was to just pump a little piece of the water up

to the top and let it come and fall down as a waterfall.

It has the other great advantage

of giving a kind of tranquility throughout here.

[birds tweeting]

We worked from the beginning

on this project with David Kelly

who is a landscape architect and a partner

at Rees Roberts + Partners, and working closely with him,

there was an idea about vegetation

that might initially appear wild.

It is something whose color and his texture.

It could have been dug out of the quarry

and ground into gravel,

so it has that kind of local character to it.

This is the continuation of that brick wall.

It was outside.

We chose a brick that was slightly irregular.

It's not perfectly flat

and it gives a texture to this wall.

There's a skylight that runs the entire length

of this brick wall.

The children's rooms have window seats.

These trees are set here to give a little bit

of privacy to these rooms.

That's Rees Roberts.

They designed these rooms, the furniture,

the cool light fixtures.

[tranquil music] [water rushing]

[bird cawing]

When you're here, there's a sense of stability.

You don't feel like you're on top

of a mountain or something.

There are other things that are about the same height

that you are.

By stepping this terrace out

to follow the profile of the quarry,

we were able to lounge here and look at all of that.

The dining area over here is probably the one

that's the most exposed.

I mean, it's the only place that's farther out than that

but you know, from here you can actually see the water,

the dock, everything.

I also think it's nice to look at the house from here,

so it's a nice view of the house I think.

A little biased probably.

[tranquil music] [water rushing]

What we were trying to do was eliminate the boundary

between the inside and the outside.

We didn't need the window to provide a foreground.

We worked very hard for the spaces outside of that,

the landscape to provide that foreground.

The idea is that perhaps there are no walls.

Perhaps you're outside all the time.

[tranquil music]

One of the things about our choice to locate the pool

over there is because we're trying

to distribute the amenities

and destinations throughout the site.

[tranquil music] [birds tweeting]

So this is a very different idea about landscape.

It may have something to do with a rock

and a pool outside of Rio by Niemeyer.

[tranquil music] [birds tweeting]

When you're looking at all of those things,

the quarry, the promontory, all of that,

it's difficult to appreciate how beautiful just being

in a woodland is, and how magical that is.

[birds tweeting]

If there were two adjectives

for a project that are my greatest ambition,

it's for a project to appear effortless and inevitable.

If someone comes over to the house,

I would prefer that they not be wowed.

I would prefer that they not know who the architect is.

I would hope

that there would be a kind of ease, serenity, comfort.

[birds tweeting]

I would love it if they began to notice

and realize there's a lot more there than what they can see.

I'm sure you've seen films

or read books and you wanna see it again

or you want to read it again, or you want to hear it again.

You know there's more there.

You've just seen parts of it.

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