Stowe Away Home

Concrete block is hardly one of the traditional building materials of the New England home, but architect Peter Rose has deployed it to create a weekend retreat in Vermont of great warmth and sophistication. To be sure, the block used here is not the ordinary concrete masonry unit of basement walls and quickie buildings. Rose, who not only practices but also teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has long been fascinated by the unexplored potential of this usually humble material, and he has worked closely with manufacturers to develop blocks with a variegated texture and range of earthy hues. In combination with the gabled roof of lead-coated copper, and the mahogany windows and fir trim, the taut block walls create a country house that seems at once strikingly contemporary and curiously ageless.

And indeed, the building, located near Stowe on the western slopes of Mount Worcester and completed half a dozen years ago, has mellowed well into the North Country landscape of granite peaks, rolling green hills and forests of maple, beech and spruce. Which pleases both client and architect; as Rose puts it, “Architecture is only half the equation—the land is the rest. And the land here is so spectacularly beautiful that it seemed especially important to make a strong house that would endure well within it.”

It is, in fact, worth emphasizing, in these days of steroidal estates, that this spacious but not overly large house achieves its marvelous effects not through endless square footage and over-scaled features but rather through thoughtful planning and subtle detailing, through the provision of panoramic views and the design of well-crafted fixtures and furniture.

ARCHITECTURE
Peter Rose