nArchitects Builds a Cedar-Clad House That Thinks Like a Forest in Upstate New York

For a firm known for urban public projects, a first house is a loaded proposition. nArchitects, the Brooklyn studio founded by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang and named a 2004 Design Vanguard practice, took nearly two decades to build one. The result sits on 13 acres in Stanfordville, New York, at the exact seam where a grassy clearing meets a stand of mature trees. The siting is not incidental. The building is pushed and angled into the tree line at the northwestern corner of the field, so that living inside it means occupying two landscapes at once: dense canopy on one side, open agricultural terrain on the other.

What makes the house genuinely interesting is not its barn silhouette, which is common enough in Dutchess County, but the organizational logic hidden behind the western red cedar rain screen. Eight lauan plywood cores, scattered through the open plan like tree trunks in a grove, contain every service element: kitchen appliances, stairs, storage, a chimney, a powder room, a library, and mechanical equipment. The rooms between those cores are never walled off except at bedrooms and bathrooms. The whole section steps with the natural grade on a concrete slab, rising through three split levels to a lofted study ringed in raw steel knee walls. It is a house designed to be navigated the way you move through a forest, by picking a path between solid objects rather than walking down corridors.

A Barn That Belongs to Two Landscapes

The gable form is deliberately vernacular. Dutchess County is zoned Rural Residential, with a mandate to maintain fields, and the surrounding context is defined by agricultural structures. nArchitects reinterprets that typology rather than mimicking it. The massing is only 27 feet wide but stretches roughly 70 feet long, producing a proportion closer to a tobacco barn than a colonial farmhouse. Western red cedar slats wrap all four elevations in a continuous rain screen, with subtle spacing variations between alternating sections that give the facade a textile quality.

At dusk, the galvalume roof catches the last light while the slatted skin glows from within, revealing the house as a lantern lodged in the trees. During the day the reading reverses: the cedar absorbs the surrounding palette of bark and dried grass, and the building recedes. That oscillation between presence and camouflage is the strongest move on the exterior. The architects kept the roof depth to a minimum, a decision enabled by the frequent structural cores below and by a geothermal system that eliminated the need for rooftop HVAC equipment.

The Covered Porch as Threshold

The covered porch on the field side is the social heart of the project. Timber ceiling boards run overhead, and slatted cedar screens filter the view to the open meadow, casting bands of patterned sunlight across the deck throughout the day. It is simultaneously inside and outside: protected from rain, shaded from direct sun, yet fully exposed to breezes and the smell of cut grass.

Large sliding glass doors dissolve the wall between the porch and the interior living spaces, so the house effectively doubles its usable area in warm months. The cedar rain screen wrapping from exterior to porch ceiling blurs the distinction between inside and out, a move that reinforces the architects' ambition to make the envelope feel permeable. This is not a house you enter through a formal threshold; you drift in, the way light filters through a canopy.

Cores as Tree Trunks

Inside, the lauan plywood cores dominate the spatial experience. Each one is a compact, floor-to-ceiling volume clad in warm, honeyed plywood, and each performs a different service role. One contains the fireplace and its surround; another houses the main stair; a third conceals kitchen appliances. Together they structure the open plan without subdividing it. You always see past and around the cores into adjacent zones, which means daylight, sound, and sight lines travel freely through the section.

The double-height living room makes the forest metaphor most legible. Standing on the polished concrete ground floor, you look up through the gaps between cores to a lofted study on the third level, where raw steel knee walls mark the father's home office. The mother's library is embedded in a core at the second level. The architects have talked about the inspiration coming from their son's wish to build a tree house, and you can feel that vertical playfulness in the way the split levels create overlapping sight lines. Family members on different floors can call to each other across the open section, a domestic echo of shouting between branches.

Crafted Circulation

The stairs are among the most refined elements in the house. An open-tread timber staircase wraps around a curved white wall, offering views back into the living space below at every landing. Elsewhere, a sculptural plywood staircase integrates its handrail into a continuous curved surface, punctuated by circular wall cutouts that serve as both borrowed-light apertures and playful visual connections between floors.

These are not neutral connectors. The architects treat vertical circulation as the primary spatial event in a compact 27-by-70-foot footprint. Because bedrooms sit at grade with direct access to the field, and communal spaces occupy the upper levels, you ascend into sociability and descend into privacy. The inversion of a typical residential section, where bedrooms sit upstairs, keeps the ground floor quiet and cool while concentrating family life where the views are longest.

Geothermal Bones and Passive Strategies

Sustainability here is structural rather than performative. Four geothermal wells handle heating and cooling, which eliminates conventional HVAC from the roof and allowed the architects to keep the galvalume shell as thin and clean as possible. Windows and sliding doors are placed to maximize cross-ventilation and daylight penetration, reducing reliance on artificial lighting. The stepped concrete slab follows the natural grade, minimizing excavation. A small basement on the north side contains only mechanical equipment.

The material palette reinforces the low-impact intention. Standard lumber framing and renewable western red cedar cladding keep the carbon footprint modest for a house of this ambition. The cedar rain screen is a breathable assembly, which means moisture management happens through airflow rather than chemical barriers. It is a strategy borrowed from agricultural buildings, where ventilated skins have always been the norm. nArchitects simply translated it into a contemporary residential envelope.

Why This Project Matters

The House Between Forest and Field demonstrates that a rural retreat does not need to choose between vernacular deference and spatial invention. The barn form reads comfortably in Dutchess County's agricultural landscape, but the interior organization, with its field of plywood cores and split-level section, belongs to a different conversation entirely. It is a house that borrows its exterior identity from the buildings around it and its interior logic from the trees beside it, and the two systems coexist without contradiction.

For nArchitects, completing a first house after two decades of practice is a milestone that reveals priorities: geothermal over gadgetry, spatial fluidity over room counts, renewable softwood over prestige materials. A second phase, completed in 2024, adds a garage, studio, and pool connected by looping paths that weave in and out of the forest line, extending the architectural thinking into landscape. The project is evidence that the most compelling residential work often comes from firms whose instincts were sharpened on public and urban commissions, then applied, with patience, to the scale of a single family.

House Between Forest and Field by nArchitects, Stanfordville, Dutchess County, New York. 3,600 sq ft. Phase 1 completed 2019–2022; Phase 2 completed 2023–2024. Photography by Michael Moran and Frank Oudeman.

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