The renovation/addition of this Tudor style residence in Rye, New York links the home to its exterior by adding light filled program and circulation. While maximizing the habitable use of the site, the addition also responds to the key parameters of the existing home, preserving its character and history within the suburban neighborhood context.

In order to create a symbiotic integration of the existing house and the new addition, we restored the original stucco and timber façade and added a new wood-clad entryway that offers a delicate and understated contrast to the neighborhood street. This new material appears again as the cladding for the more minimalist and abstract box addition that extends from the rear of the home. Its simple rectangular form both contrasts and compliments the original Tudor, post and beam gable structure.

The addition is wrapped in a dark, charcoal-stained cedar skin, mimicking the colors found on the existing façade. The wood timber transforms into wood skin that wraps the new addition in a moiré enclosure system that reinterprets the white stucco and dark wood timber of the New England Tudor Style. The skin striates to reveal a glass enclosure and allows light into the interior rooms. The perceptual effect of oscillations between exterior monolithic form (platonic box) and wood siding/planking as an abstract striation allows the addition to move back and forth between autonomous/porous and related to its progenitor (the existing house). By carving into the rectangular box, we define the key spatial concept for the new house, which include the addition of a family and mudroom on the first floor, as well as a master bedroom suite on the second floor. The glass stairwell built between the existing house and the addition creates a transitional “white space,” allowing natural light to filter through to the rooms on each side. The new wood, steel, and glass stair was hung from the existing house’s chimney, which creates a sectional void, offering moments of visual and spatial connectivity within and beyond to the landscape. Through a series of elegant yet poignant disjunctions between light and space, the design seamlessly integrates the existing and new addition.

Photography ©David Sundberg/Esto and Dorothy Hong