The Deep Dive: The Circle Game

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.

A trend appears to be emerging from the pages of the March/April issue. Both Josh and Natalie Pritchard’s residence in the woods of New Gloucester, Maine, as well as the house that Remo Kommnick and Emi Moore constructed largely by themselves in Front Royal, Virginia, sport pairs of circular windows.

The Pritchards worked with Portland-based firm Woodhull on the 4,200-square-foot residence featured in "Budget Breakdown: A Maine Family Build Their First Home With $500K—and Plenty of Helping Hands." According to architect David Morris, director of Woodhull’s residential studio, the Pritchards’ Pinterest discoveries and precedent images revealed a deep fondness for basic geometries. He recalls that while their interest in "fundamental shapes" was not necessarily stated aloud, it seemed so emphatic that the design team first proposed a house sporting a triangular footprint. "We want them to see possibilities, even if in this case we did a few things more adventurously than they were expecting," says Morris. "[The design] became a process of revising and revisiting to get at something that felt right to them." 

The finalized project preserves the triangle, albeit in elevation rather than plan: It comprises larger and smaller gable structures, respectively containing the living space and a garage with an upstairs office, connected by a breezeway. The parallel cedar-clad volumes "were conceived to sit on the brink of the hill between the upper and lower portions of the site," Morris explains of the revised design’s relationship to the 11-acre property. "The site itself is really quite interesting, because the lower portion is large and flat like a soccer field, and it was always envisioned as a spot for kids to play. On the upper portion there’s this incredible wetland—it’s fairylike and frankly a little bit strange, because one expects water to travel downhill."

By linking the site’s two most memorable landscapes, Woodhull could fenestrate the project to maximize views to both. A circular window installed in the west elevation of the residence frames a grove of wetland trees west of the Pritchards’ living room. A north-facing circle centered above two garage doors creates some privacy for the office, as the north elevation of the larger volume has no apertures whatsoever. Morris adds that, for those pulling into the driveway, the composition of the garage’s gable-topped front evokes the dialogue between circles, triangles, and rectangles that was evident in the Pritchards’ original mood boards. "A gabled box is not new architecture, it’s familiar," Morris says. "But throwing in unconventional notions like circular windows or an elevation devoid of windows allows everyone to be exploratory, even whimsical, without threatening the safety of a form we’ve drawn since childhood and which we know sheds water and snow. The result is comfortable, but not too comfortable."

 For Virginia–based Patrick Farley, the architect behind "A Couple Build a Cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains for $150K—Without Borrowing a Cent," the wish for a circular window did not have to be teased from precedent imagery. Rather, Emi Moore had requested it explicitly. "I wouldn’t have thought of a circular aperture," Farley says, "It took me some processing to determine how best to approach it."

Farley accomplished a scheme at an otherwise swift pace. He had camped out on the four-acre site while returning home from a trip to Fallingwater (the building pointed an 11-year-old Farley toward architecture as a profession, and he makes a pilgrimage to it biennially), and within a week he and the clients had proceeded from schematics to design development. The architect humbly refers to the final form as a shoebox: a 16-by-32-foot rectangular volume whose shed roof "is sort of a folded plane, in that the roof becomes wall and wall becomes roof." Upon further reflection, he also draws a link from the simple shelters installed along the nearby Appalachian Trail, saying that the new residence and its precedents share a "lean-to simplicity." 

Neither description pays full credit to the sophistication of Farley’s work. To express the slope, the shoebox is lifted over its hillside via Sonotube-formed piles, with its deck cantilevering beyond the roof eave. Its siting also considers the dynamic between a natural rock outcropping and the manmade volume, and it minimized tree removal. Meanwhile, both the siting and fenestration had to take neighbors’ homes and privacy into account.

Farley ultimately opted for a pair of circular windows for the project, known as Doah House, to each punctuate a short side of the shoebox. Confirming his point that these accents weren’t considered lightly, the architect says that placement "wasn’t as simple as a punch in a wall." Explaining that the hillside slopes in two axes, Farley eschewed aligning the circles vertically to underscore the less visible of the hillside’s two gradients. "It also works well, because on one end you have a corner kitchen and the aperture is lifted to make the [adjacent space] conducive to a dining banquette. The opposite circular window, which appears lower, is paired to a window seat. That’s where you capture the view."

Farley as well as Morris acknowledge that they were surprised that their projects would include circular windows, as they have not been a popular motif in contemporary houses for decades. Farley in turn notes that Doah House’s pair of windows commanded a premium price and, speaking more generally, Morris points out that installation of circular windows within orthogonal building frames requires construction finesse. Yet the benefits—including the bragging rights of potentially starting a trend—outweighed the challenges.

We welcome your thoughts and illustrative projects. Reach out to pro@dwell.com.