When Elizabeth Birdsall was a young girl, growing up in Florida, she would spend summers in a cabin on family land in western Albemarle. It’s a lush spot along a small river—a leafy contrast to the more settled area where she lived the rest of the year. She and her sister used to spend hours in the woods, riding ponies over ridges and ravines.
The memory of that landscape stayed with her. When a small house on the edge of the ravine became hers about 10 years ago, Birdsall found the setting more important than the structure—a two-bedroom ranch built in 1983 in an odd mishmash of styles she jokingly calls “Japanese Tudor.” Though well sited, the house seemed to shut out its surroundings rather than embrace them.
A hallway takes on intimate proportions as it leads to the bedroom, with its one entire wall made of glass. |
So, when Birdsall hired Formwork Design to transform her house, she asked for a stronger connection between indoors and outdoors. “My primary interest was the idea of living in the landscape while having creature comforts,” she says. Since moving in, she’d taken up birdwatching in bed and “wanted all the rooms to facilitate that.”
Now, four years after construction wrapped up in 2004, the house, called Turkey Saddle, looks a lot like the “grown-up treehouse” she’d hoped for.
Shaping the view
“[Elizabeth] knew how to tell us how she wanted to live without preconditions about how it would look,” says Cecilia Hernandez, a Formwork principal and the main architect on the project. For a while, the option of a complete teardown was on the table; Hernandez grimaces when she describes the original house (“It looked like a Stealth Bomber, it had so many angles,” she says). But, she says, “Our thrifty eco-selves did not want to throw away what was there.”
The new volume added by Formwork, on the left, has large banks of windows facing west. |
The resulting plan takes the house’s original footprint as a starting point, extends it slightly, and adds a completely new structure to one side, connected by a glass-walled bridge. From almost any point in the interior, multiple windows beckon one’s eyes outside. And meanwhile, the landscape design, by Sara Osborne at Nelson Byrd Woltz, seems to return that gaze.
Hernandez is quick to share credit for the project with Osborne and other collaborators, and it’s particularly clear how architect and landscape architect needed to work in close collaboration to create this multilayered space. It’s impossible to describe the interior of Turkey Saddle without describing the exterior, and vice versa. The approach by car reveals almost nothing of what’s to come. “Elizabeth didn’t want anything ostentatious,” Hernandez says; the house’s low, horizontal profile, and the fact that Osborne sited the parking area a little distance away from the house, means that the house only becomes fully visible as you walk downhill along a path.
In winter, the footbridge over the river comes into view through the glass bridge; Osborne aligned the footpath with it so that the public approach, from one’s car, almost magically points to this more private, whimsical walkway. |
Even before reaching the front door, you can see all the way through the house and out the rear wall at more than one place, so the wooded view seems to penetrate the structure. Conversely, the house begins to embrace you when you’re still outside, in the courtyard. Once through the front door, if not distracted by a large intriguing fossil and two framed black-and-white photographs on the built-in shelves, you might be tempted to turn left, toward the indoor dining table and the other public areas of the house—kitchen and living room—which flow comfortably into each other.
But if you turned right, you’d pass into a glass-walled bridge, then into the new structure imagined by Formwork. Hernandez describes it as “two boxes—one open to the ground, one open to the west.” The first is a white cube lit by a band of windows around the bottom; the second is the master suite. “Elizabeth wanted privacy between the public and private parts of the house,” she explains. “She likes to have a retreat,” for reading and sleeping. The bedroom and bathroom each have one entire wall made of glass: a sweeping, timeless view of the trees.
Watching the changes
These are the broad outlines of the house. Talking with Hernandez, it’s clear how many relatively subtle factors are at work to create its feel. “The sight lines are really important—having a sense of what space you’re in, in subtle ways,” says Hernandez. In the underlit white cube, a set of stairs leads down, mirroring another set outside the glass, this one descending among hostas and ferns. Both have the low proportions typical of outdoor steps, tying inside and outside together.
The courtyard is within the embrace of the L-shaped structure. A dining table outside is big enough to seat 14, and it’s mirrored, through four large glass sliding doors, by an equally large table inside. |
The design takes every opportunity to let in light, open views, and invite people out. A lightwell inserted within a small deck off the living room illuminates a tight hallway on the basement level (where there’s a guest room and den). Hernandez opened the walls of an existing stairway so that light pours down it and a sight line passes through it. And she put sliding glass doors between the two long dining tables so that, in good weather, nearly 30 people can be seated in what becomes a single, expansive indoor/outdoor space.
One result is that the house feels much bigger than it is. “Elizabeth didn’t need a huge living room,” Hernandez says. “The dining room was very small, and she loves to give dinner parties. We doubled the size of the dining room.” Both dining tables are designed to break into three parts and move around. “I’ve done every possible configuration,” says Birdsall, “from formal, with everyone at [the indoor] table, to both tables with the doors open, moving pieces of the table in and out.”
Her husband, Eric Young, came to the house for one such party and, he says, “never left”; he remembers arriving at night and seeing the glow of the indoor lights through all the windows, and once inside, lights reflecting from glass in all directions. Osborne created a linear planting of a pencil-like plant called horsetail along the courtyard; at night, lights behind these plants throw tall shadows on the low concrete wall.
As you might expect, the rhythmic changes of the landscape have a large presence in the house, from the daily movement of the sun to the slower shifts of the seasons. A contemporary take on the crystal chandelier, over the dining table, throws refracted light throughout the space every morning; a near-white shade of lilac on the living room ceiling only becomes apparent at dusk.
In winter, leaves fall and reveal the river more fully; in summer, the blood-red peonies bloom along the walkway from the parking area, easily seen from indoors. Some shifts are functional, too. Standing in the master bedroom, with its massive windows facing west, Hernandez says, “As architects, we’re trained to minimize western exposure,” which invites afternoon heat gain. But in this case, “the leaves are a natural louvre.” In winter, the leaves drop and the heat is welcome in.
Inside the white cube, indoor steps matched to those outside provide a sensory cue that, even within the walls, you are just a window’s width from the landscape. |
And there are the movements of wildlife. Birdsall’s been watching a nesting pair of pileated woodpeckers this year, and says, “Twice this spring I saw a bald eagle from my bedroom.” The quiet in this spot is deep, echoed by the cool white of the interior walls and Birdsall’s spare placement of framed photographs. “I love this idea that I can spend a day or a week in my house and never feel cooped up,” she says. “I’ve spent time living in places where the curtains are always drawn. Here I never have to go out; I am out.”
Tricks to turning outward
One reason the Turkey Saddle house sends the gaze outdoors is that its interior is minimal and spare. Even if you’re not in the market for a massive renovation and addition project that’ll add windows and subtract walls, you can create a less distracting state inside your abode, the better to draw the eye toward the landscape.
Birdsall considered getting an outdoor hot tub but says her indoor tub is close enough, especially with the big windows open. |
Coordinate furniture and paint colors for a more unified interior. At Turkey Saddle, white walls and ceilings draw the public part of the house into a whole, though it’s a complex space with many corners and sigh tlines. White also unifies living room shelves, dining room sideboard and kitchen cabinets.
Minimize heavy window coverings. Masses of drapes and curtains on small windows close down the connection to outdoors; go for lighter fabrics or, as in the bedrooms at Turkey Saddle, install full-length curtains that slide on tracks and can be gathered into one corner of the room when not needed.
Consider built-ins. Formwork’s built-in shelves, cabinets and furniture become part of each room’s architecture rather than objects that clutter the space.
Group books and other objects in designated spaces. Allow swaths of empty wall space to rest the eye.
Collect objects that refer to the outdoors. On our visit, cut peonies from the bushes outside were placed in several rooms; stones, fossils and other natural objects provided year-round decoration and a link to the land.
