A Max Smith Home

This architect's own home, tucked into the flora-filled recesses of Harvard Avenue, might just be the city's best kept secret. Clad in individually hand-dipped gray wood exterior shingles, this home was crafted from the outside in, firmly rooted in and grown from its scenery. This site-specific design expresses optimism about a building's relationship with the natural environment. Inspired by the hybrid of modern and vernacular architecture of Sea Ranch, this home is commanded by its landscape, and a sensitivity to the surrounding ecology. The woody exterior is interspersed with skylights and lookouts and floor-to-ceiling windows. The home's asymmetrical form, with its slanted roofs, offshoots, and bridges, makes it feel completely natural and organic. Even the winds are invited to circulate more freely through the deliberate absence of overhanging roof eaves. This property exists in its own microclimate, shrouded in vegetation and nestled beside a year round creek that winds its way over a rocky bed. A secluded koi pond is fed by a natural spring that replenishes itself endlessly, inviting song birds and dragonflies to gather, sing, and play their wing beats. Clusters of maple trees, pines, and Chinese dogwood form a canopy over ferns and other verdant layers, and a flowering meditation garden.

This home's interior serves as a path, or passageway down seven half-floors, descending into the garden below. The centerpiece is a sculptural staircase with switchbacks and landings at each artfully curated transition point. (The home also features an elevator–a rarity–for ease of lifting and moving.) Beginning with the main level entry, there's an open living room, library nook, and office that connects to the master bedroom just a half a floor down. The feeling is loft-like, with clean white walls, high ceilings and exposed beams, and an abundance of natural light. The kitchen was placed on a middle floor, dividing private spaces above from public spaces below. A cozy private lounge, complete with its own fireplace, connects off the side of the kitchen.

This home is a journey of time and space, created not just by post and timber, but with thoughtful and intentional design. This concept of layering of floors and rooms, and the gradual arrival into place and purpose, provides a tangible sense of gravity and ascension, ebb and flow, movement and rest. Like tide to shore, you will be drawn upward and down, inward and out. You will find yourself, willingly, absorbed into the rhythmic tranquility.