Nomentana Residence

Description

This modestly sized site yields an intimate view across a pond to Lord's Hill, the eastern-most boundary of the White Mountains National Forest. The hill, an inclined plane approaching the vertical, comforts with summer-spring greenery, dazzles with fall colours, shimmers and glistens in winter snow and ice.

The house perches at the brink of the downward slope to the pond. Breathing in the site, the house transfigures it through a series of internal spatial events?framing, focusing, enclosing, extending, dismissing, and celebrating. Relocated from the farm to the forest, the house refers to and reinterprets the "big house, little house, back house, barn" of the famous children's rhyme.

Like Maine houses before it, the house is a result of form added on to form, spaces adjoining defensively and closely clustering, resisting long, harsh, Maine winters, and giving the impression of small "house-towns." Always looking back on itself, the rooms of the house are never alone. The house gives the impression of being rural and remote but not in isolation.