Widget House - a new house in the woods
An architectural joke?
The welder and constructor of the Water’s Edge had purchased a wooded sloping lot near Andover, Mass. This project provided one of those architect dilemmas - if the couple don’t agree, who is the client? She wanted a traditional North Shore home that would look like it always had been there. He wanted a large, daring indoor/outdoor space - framed in steel - that would allow him to show off his structural and welding daring. I delighted in the challenge and developed the “Harold Lloyd hat cut in half” parti, boldly allowing for both esthetics - one side, traditional North Shore, the other side glass and steel exuberance. See also the Shultz House.
You don’t have to squint too hard to see that the main floor plan resembles an elevation of a two-story house, complete with smoke wafting around the house - the shapes of the terrace and walkways. After all the good-natured ribbing I had received for the fanciful rooftop shapes of the Water’s Edge, which ‘Widgie’ had to figure out, I felt that it was my turn for a bit of humor, incorporating his elevational sketch of what a two-story house might look like.
