Architectural studio Young Projects has completed Six Square House, a new 3,500-square-foot home located on a verdant, two-acre lot in Bridgehampton, New York. The residence is made up of six 24’x24’ gabled modules, arranged to align roof ridges and create continuity from one module to the next. In contrast, each module’s roof eaves flow upward and downward, which result in a variety of undulating surfaces and unexpected sight lines across the exterior and interior of the home. The home is clad in deep gray, slatted Accoya wood, whose striations enhance the roofscape’s dynamic edges and arcs.
Project credits:
Project Name: Six Square House
Architecture: Young Projects
General Contractor: Taconic Builders
Structural Engineer: Silman
Landscape Architecture: Coen+Partners
Landscaper: Landscape Details
Photography: Alan Tansey, Young Projects, Lifestyle Production Group
Rainscreen Supplier: reSAWN TIMBER co.
Styling: Matter Made and Young Projects
Kitchen Millwork, Island Millwork and Bathroom Millwork: Chapter+Verse
Photography by Alan Tansey
The completion of Six Square House coincides with Young Projects’ addition to the lot’s historic 1850 farmhouse, which is located at the front of the property, and a new pool house, gunite pool, and ipe deck at the property’s rear. Sited at the lot’s center, Six Square House becomes the nucleus of the property as well as the client’s primary on-site residence, with the farmhouse becoming the guest home.
Young Projects designed Six Square House as a contemporary counterpart to the property’s farmhouse, which the client had outgrown. The studio set out to create a new residence that nods subtly to the historic architecture of Long Island, while radically reimagining a traditional barn typology as an elegant, innovative home. “Starting with the simple vernacular typology of a barn, the hybrid roofscape of the connected squares ebbs and flows as a new dynamic figure, contemporary in its language but timeless in its origin,” says Bryan Young, founder and co-principal of Young Projects.
Approaching Six Square House from the front of the property provides a view of the garage and living room modules, separated by a polished concrete path that leads directly into the home’s focal point: a triangular courtyard. The deep-grey rainscreen facade is striking. The slatted roof aligns with slatted exterior walls to create long, vertical striations that begin at the roof ridge and cascade to the ground. Roof and exterior walls are constructed from the same material: charred, stained, and sealed Accoya rainscreen and Western Red Cedar rainscreen. These are durable and low-maintenance engineered woods that play off of the farmhouse’s historic cedar facade while reading as distinctly contemporary.
“The exterior palette was selected with the cedar of the farmhouse as a starting consideration,” says Marciniak. “We found the black very striking and contemporary in its initial appearance, but the material eventually weathers to a really nice platinum grey.”
In terms of plan, the six modules that make up Six Square House tessellate around the central triangular courtyard. For Young Projects, this arrangement offered a compelling visual balance between symmetry and asymmetry, depending on the inhabitant’s point of reference in the home. The hybrid roofscape, which combines aligned roof ridges and curving eaves, enhances this dichotomy.
The tessellated arrangement also creates strategic programmatic divisions across the home, with each module loosely tied to a different use: living, kitchen, main bedroom, secondary bedroom, porch, and garage, all which encircle the triangular courtyard. Additionally, this layout takes advantage of the surrounding landscape, with each module offering a different view of the lush property.
Bedrooms feature framed views of the site’s mature and gnarled trees for privacy. In particular, the main bedroom offers a direct view to an old purple beech tree, which is very dear to the client. Living spaces open directly onto a landscape designed for entertaining: central courtyard, meadow, and pool house. The kitchen, located at the center of the house, is adjacent to the “left-over” triangular courtyard and looks through the open porch that frames views of landscape beyond.
The living areas and kitchen are linked, resolving as a large open space that emphasizes the undulating flow of the ceiling—a result of the irregular roofscape above. “The spaces within the house both respect and blur across the modules,” says Marciniak. “And the connections between modules generate the most interesting interior spaces as well as the interesting roofline geometry.” While the ceiling undulates through the common area, it is marked by a ruled geometry; the wood framing itself is not bent, rather each straight rafter rotates slightly relative to its neighbors, developing a curving surface in aggregate.
Throughout the home, material selections and their corresponding color palette follow a neutral, organic spectrum, codified by a given space’s use. Black and platinum grey materials define the home’s exterior: the polished concrete patios and charred Accoya facade and roofscape. Ochre-hued cedar clads the home’s hybrid indoor/outdoor zones: the triangular courtyard and porch, as well as the frames for all exterior-facing doors and windows. Finally, the interior sheathed in alabasters and whites: walls and ceilings are gypsum plaster, flooring and millwork is white oak and ash, and countertops and selected shelving are light marble (Calacatta Caldia, Calacatta Gold, Mountain White, Olympian White).
“The interior palette was selected to have a general lightness and warmth appropriate for a summer house in the Hamptons: soft, light wood finishes, warm white walls, and stone countertops,” says Marciniak. “Materials are generally composed in a way that reads as textural variations on a tight color palette rather than high contrast or loud materials.”
Overall, Six Square House strikes an elegant, innovative balance across both interiors and exteriors: “One one hand, the design of the house is governed by its own geometric logic,” explains Young. “On the other, the design reframes and connects back to the overall site.”
ABOUT YOUNG PROJECTS
Young Projects is a design studio founded by Bryan Young in New York City in 2010. Our work spans buildings, interiors, material prototyping, furniture, and objects of curiosity driven by an interest in pattern, texture, and spatial complexity. The body of work connects through an experimental approach to material properties and material deployment. Our designs seek to unearth invisible or previously unexplored aesthetic qualities through trials of material formation. We see the results as distinct from Modernism’s associations with material and tectonic clarity. Instead, we produce material and tectonic ambiguity…or at least the unexpected.
The research has included: hand-pulling plaster with an irregular knife, forming concrete with palm stems, thinning onyx to varied transparencies, and growing crystals of spiritual significance. These experiments, among many others, reveal qualities one would not typically associate with a given substance. Our research sometimes literally breaks traditional methodology, allowing for characteristics of randomness and spontaneity to enter the process of making. We find that letting go of control (by working with unpredictable chemicals, for instance) produces results that are surprising, alluring, and resist replication. The looseness of our approach is determined by intrinsic material properties and organizational tendencies that are discovered and teased out rather than predetermined or designed.
Our fascination with ambiguity and transformation also extends to our approach to form and geometry as we look for ways to highlight shifting and hybrid readings of space. This results in highly charged and complex spatial propositions, where various elements seem to evolve (from void to mass or from compressed to expansive) as one moves through a building. Across our projects, there is a deep, inextricable relationship between our material research and our approach to space-making.
