A Separate Peace

Savasana is the final pose in a yoga session, a chance to reflect on your practice and prepare to reenter the real world—an attempt to reach a state of total relaxation. It's a feeling most of us would like to carry with us as we go about our daily lives; a sense of tranquility that we'd instill in our homes, if we only knew how. 

One Middleton, Massachusetts, yoga practitioner didn't know how, but she knew someone who did. She approached architect Mary McKenna with a simple request: a quiet space within her home to meditate and do yoga, a room of calm in this crazy world. 

Mary McKenna specializes in “spaces that stimulate the senses.” The Winchester, Massachusetts-based architect worked on the design and planning of the space for about a year, garnering input from the homeowner through probing questions and “homework assignments” that would help her determine the physical manifestation of the project's philosophical concept. “Mary would give me assignments every time we met,” recalls the homeowner. “She would say, ‘For the next three weeks, cut out pictures of anything you like.' I gave her a loose-leaf notebook of stuff.”

McKenna played selections from the homeowner's favorite CDs while working on the project, searching for inspiration in the soothing tunes. “It's very holistic,” says McKenna of her design process. “I don't think there's any other way to do it.” 

The approach worked. “Once I saw the first model, it was really quite clear that she was expressing everything I was incapable of expressing,” says the homeowner.

McKenna named the project Sacred Harbor. “The name came from a couple of things,” she recalls. “Getting to know the owner, the type of space she desired and how she spoke about it. She has a picture in her house of a rowboat in the harbor in a very New England-y/Cape Cod fog. Just a simple boat floating in the middle—that was the space we were creating. This sacred containment that would harbor her yoga space, her rejuvenation.”

The main frame of Sacred Harbor is steel, which affords vast, unobstructed expanses of space. Cantilevers make the different levels appear to float, and interlocking vertical channel glass pieces—some as tall as twenty feet—travel from the bottom floor to the top gable, allowing sunlight into the space all day long. Depending on the outside light, the glass changes from honey to green to blue, turning it into a completely different room at any given time of day. “It's very poetic, but gives you total privacy,” says McKenna.

The 3,000-square-foot, multi-level addition was completed as two separate parts: on the east side of the house, a sunroom acts as an extension of the outdoors, a transitional area where the homeowner can decompress from the outside world. It is also a room for conversation and entertaining friends, the alter ego of the west side addition.  

The yoga/meditation area on the opposite side of the house is a dynamic space built as a three-dimensional path on which you travel up and down to obtain different degrees of privacy. Enter into the meditation room by a glass-and-wood staircase with built-in seating. At the landing, choose to walk outside onto the terrace that overlooks a Zen garden and soaking tub, or continue up to a small loft and sit under a glass skylight, your own private space under the sky. Below the loft is a large yoga area and raised altar.

“Every space interconnects—it's about a journey,” explains McKenna. “The moment you enter through a large sliding door you're in this world, and there's a whole process of coming in and changing, cleansing yourself in the spa and then moving up to the top level and being able to be at peace. You can always see where you've been and where you're going.”

ARCHITECTURE
Mary McKenna, Mary McKenna & Associates