Design and architecture inspiration for modern homes from Dwell.

At Home in the Modern World

Dwell › Homes

New Grass Roots

When they want to escape the mayhem of city life in Chicago, Diane Pascal and Thomas Richie retreat to their low-profile getaway in Hennepin, Illinois, a town where agriculture and ecology are still a part of the locals’ common knowledge.

x house exteriorSlideshow

Diane Pascal and Thomas Richie don’t quite blend in. When they venture to the farmers’ market from their weekend home in Hennepin, Illinois, vendors often ask where they’re from. “There aren’t a lot of Volvo station wagons around here,” says Pascal. Unlike most weekend visitors to the area, they’re not recreational hunters, and they don’t ride ATVs out to visit their neighbors.

But Hennepin, a small Illinois River town about 100 miles southwest of Chicago with a population of 707, is exactly the sort of place Pascal and her husband were searching for in 2004, when they began scouting a spot to build. Spurning trendy summer outposts like the Lake Michigan shores, they chose Hennepin, where you’re more likely to pass a coal plant worker on the street than a vacationing CEO.

Richie, a freelance advertising creative director, and Pascal, the development officer for an organiza-tion serving homeless people, maintain a sense of humor about their city-slickerdom. They are determined to learn about the environment they’ve adopted, from the lovely purple flowers blooming in their prairie backyard (Pascal wishes she knew the name) to the tall, kelly green crops grown by their farmer neighbors (Richie thinks it’s switchgrass, but he’s not sure). “I wonder if people moving from country to city feel as clueless as I do,” Pascal jokes.

Back-to-the-land hippies they’re not: X House is filled with the trappings of a modern metropolitan existence—a red retro kitchen clock, a Fireorb in the living room, concrete bedroom floors. Inside and out, though, the home manages to disappear into the rural landscape, thanks to considered treatment of the building’s proportions.

xhouselivingroomdoordetail.jpgslideshow

The wooden doors in the living room practically vanish when closed. Sliding them open reveals modern bedroom suites in a lighter, brighter palette.

Designed to fit the owners’ tight budget and concerns about their ecological footprint, the house is just 1,600 square feet, but it feels much larger. The home is situated on 14 acres of Midwestern prairie and woodland, where the ambient noise sounds like a new-age relaxation CD: chirping birds, light wind, buzzing insects, and a babbling creek. So it’s ironic that Pascal and Richie chose UrbanLab, the boutique firm founded by husband-and-wife duo Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn, to design their place. Felsen and Dunn, both professors of architecture, are widely regarded as two of Chicago’s hottest young designers for a body of work located primarily within the bounds of the city. Indeed, Felsen admits he’d probably buy a place in the Sears Tower before he’d build a house for himself in the country.

That urban-rural tension, however, was crucial to innovations that helped position the design between classic and cutting-edge. Though Dunn led the project, it was a collaboration: She and Richie were the dreamers, suggesting ideas far out of their price range; Felsen and Pascal were the realists, steering their spouses toward what made fiscal and logistical sense. The architects spent months creating prototypes. “They would’ve kept designing indefinitely if we hadn’t stopped them,” says Pascal.

Dunn’s final concept placed the house on the boundary between two natural territories, in a sort of “X marks the spot” configuration. The central living space is located at the intersection point of the X, which resembles a pair of funnel cones placed end to end. The walls spread out to create panoramic views of woodlands to the south and prairie to the north, like a pair of frameless landscape paintings. Knotty pine, chosen for its graphic quality, covers the room from floor to ceiling, with the orientation of the slats modeled on the property’s topographic lines. It lends the space the feeling of a roomy sauna, though substantial airflow keeps it cool.

To the east and west, camouflaged behind sliding wooden doors, are what Dunn calls the “quiet zones.” The master bedroom and bathroom sit on one side of the house, while a guest wing, which comprises a bedroom and bathroom, plus a small office/living area, occupies the other. These zones are radically different from the main room, resembling modern urban apartments.

xhouseportraitfireplace.jpslideshow

The rear of the main room features floor-to-ceiling glass panels that frame a view of a shortgrass prairie and the woods behind the house. A suspended Fireorb echoes the vertical line of the trees.

The kitchen is open, simple, and small. It’s mostly functional, with a few clever touches, such as an extra-tall stainless steel backsplash and a random polka-dot arrangement of compact fluorescent lamp bulbs on the ceiling.

Elsewhere, Pascal and Richie opted for custom creations: When they couldn’t find light fixtures they liked for the living room, Felsen, whose father owned a lighting company, designed overhead lights that evoke a computer circuit board. A metalsmith fabricated the steel, and then Felsen and UrbanLab staffer Lee Greenberg wired them. To limit costs, Richie scoured the Internet and Chicago boutiques for original fixtures and furniture, such as the Keuco-made clean-white-block bathroom vanities. The walls are filled with photographs and faux-advertisement prints by Richie and other friends.

Richie feared that this modern house on the prairie might eventually find itself outdated. From the road, though, the corrugated-aluminum structure doesn’t seem out of place. It’s reminiscent of the farm buildings that dot the landscape. When the couple moved in, the movers drove past the home twice, stopping only after Pascal flagged them down.

xhousekitchenlightingdetail.jpgslideshow

In the kitchen, compact fluorescent lightbulbs affixed to the ceiling are a simple solution.

But the natural and full-grown state of the surrounding land is intentional. Pascal and Richie have been managing their acreage primarily on their own based on the overall outdoor plan devised by UrbanLab and landscape architect Chandra Goldsmith. The couple, who admit little prior knowledge of country living, are learning as they go. A Putnam County High School teacher brings kids from FFA (an agricultural education organization founded as Future Farmers of America) to get some hands-on science education by maintaining 1.5 acres that have been restored into a natural prairie habitat. They worked with a forester to develop a land management plan for 12 acres of forest, placing it under the Federal Conservation Reserve Program.

Now that they’ve become familiar with their new habitat, Pascal and Richie can’t help but resist the prospect of other buyers following them out to Hennepin. Richie’s native Acworth, Georgia, a once-rural Atlanta suburb where cows sometimes roamed into his yard, lost its small-town feel when that metropolitan area exploded. Already, Chicago’s sprawl has gobbled up the towns halfway down the highway to Hennepin. Though the couple knows that increased foot traffic would benefit local business, they nevertheless hope that other city dwellers will be slow to discover the town they treasure as their own little secret. “I feel selfish when I say it,” Richie says, “but I don’t want anything to change.” 

To see more images, please visit the slideshow.

Related Items

See All

Dwell Cover
Advertising
Advertising
Advertising

Latest

See More

Follow

Dwell

  • Kelsey Keith

    Sofia Coppola has a nice loft for sale in Little Italy, but how 'bout those bentwood Breuer chairs? http://t.co/w4OdmvgZ #design #hubbahubba

  • Aaron Britt

    Huge crowd at the sf #design center for @dwellprez and @dianabudds talking social media.

  • Diana Budds

    Getting ready for the social media and #design panel at SFDC http://t.co/gnBp543c

  • Aaron Britt

    The new anteak line from @walkerzanger looks pretty good. #Design #tile

Subscribe Today Don't Miss a Word of Dwell
Dwell Cover

$19.95
10 Issues / a Year

Copyright ©2004-2012 Dwell Media LLC. All rights reserved. Dwell, the Dwell logo, Dwell Homes and At Home in the Modern World are registered trademarks of Dwell Media LLC