Rural house combines wide vistas, security, and privacy within walls of glass
Baku, November 12 (AZERTAC). What do you do if your client wants a glass house but is also afraid of thunderstorms? If you are award-winning architect Thomas Phifer, you design Taghkanic House on a 200 acre (81-hectare) plot in New York's Hudson Valley. Presently for sale at US$6.75 million (or with an additional 150 acres/60.7 hectares for US$8.5 million), the house is cleverly designed to combine openness and security.
Taghkanic House is large, at 8,800 square feet (820 sm) of floor area. The most obvious feature is the 1,800 sf (167 sm) glass pavilion with 15-foot (4.6-meter) ceilings, which Phifer calls the "celebratory space." The pavilion looks out on 360-degree views of the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains, and from many angles appears to be sitting by itself atop a grassy, treed hill. This is due to the fact that the bulk of the house (7,000 sf/650 sm) is underground, nestled beneath a thriving sod roof. The underground rooms are built along the front and back of the house, and have large glass windows and doors to let in the day's light. The corridors between the rooms receive light via skylights imbedded in the sod roof.
As mentioned above, the owner of the house liked the idea of a glass house, but wanted a bit more protection from storms. This, combined with a childhood experience with a neighbor's underground house in South Africa, resulted in the Taghkanic House's unusual hybrid nature. Mixing a sense of dwelling with nature and a largely underground house is a challenging task that was extremely well carried out here.
It is rather difficult to get a feeling for the overall structure of the house from the photographs in this article, owing to the lack of conventional features. We'll begin our tour of Taghkanic House by looking at the four sides, beginning with the following photo of the rear of the house, rather arbitrarily designated as the side with the swimming pool, then move counterclockwise around the house.
The patio and pool jut out from the center of the house, which on this side is marked by a small extension of the glass pavilion. You will notice the windows and doors of the underground rooms, which peek out from under the sod room. There is a number of trees seen growing on the roof. Actually the sod is not thick enough to hold the trees, which are anchored in additional soil within the substructure of the house. You can see on the right side of the house the surrounding terrain sloping up to meet the sod roof.
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