The Woodstock Notion of Architecture

The fourteen-acre site in upstate New York seemed to have everything in the way of  landscaping: expansive lawns, stone walls, unmowed fields, deep forests and the Catskill Mountains beyond.

Everything, that is, except a courtyard.

So that’s what architect Cary Tamarkin envisioned for a friend’s home there. “The whole genesis was to add the one type of outdoor space he didn’t have – a forty-foot by forty-foot courtyard.”

The home would be designed and built around it by his hand-picked team of architects, interior designers and builders. He turned to former partner Timothy Techler of the Techler Design Group out of Boston for design collaboration, to interior designer Suzanne Shaker of New York for impeccable taste, to local contractors Harmony Builders for construction, and to Dwayne Barber of Alachua, Fla. for old-growth cypress rescued from the swamps of the South.

Inspired by the site and the idea of a courtyard, he looked back to early houses by Marcel Breuer and Elliot Noyes, and to classical Japanese architecture. “I was trying to achieve an elevated, but pared down, quality,” he said. “The butterfly roof, turned up halfway like it is, was inspired by Breur.”

The home’s stone planes and fireplace mass, stacked twenty feet high onto block walls, were constructed by a local mason who hadn’t yet worked on anything of that magnitude.  “We asked him to make it art,” Cary said. “It grows up out of the ground in abstract planes of un-pierced rock walls. In a hundred years, only the walls will still be there.”

Suzanne found its dining room table – a massive slab of teak, with matching benches – at the Hudson Furniture Company in New York. She also specified the Naguchi globes hovering over it. The floor beneath is natural cleft Quaker black slate from Pennsylvania, laid out in a random pattern. “It takes its cues from a Corbusier house in India,” Cary said. “It’s nice to see the sun slide across the it, and pull out its cleft.”

All of it – the steel window frames, the stone and cypress walls, the floors of slate – seem inspired by simple, if elegant, connections to the landscape outside. “It just feels very earthy,” he said.

Only occasionally does the developer and architect take on a project of this scope and nature. This one was to become a labor of love for a good friend.  “I did it with passion,” Cary said. “That’s the only way to do this kind of architecture.”

For more information on The Tamarkin Compnay, go to www.tamarkinco.com. Fo more on The Techler Group, go to http://www.techlerdesign.com. For more on Suzanne Shaker, go to www.suzanneshaker.com. For more on Harmony Builders, go to http://www.harmonybuilders.com/. And for more on Dwayne Barber, go to http://www.woodfinder.com/listings/004241.php.