Like a Burst of Architectural DNA

After an inspiring trip to Fallingwater in 2007, George Smart came home to the Research Triangle Park (RTP) area of North Carolina and immediately began work on a model for his new home.

The executive director of Triangle Modernist Houses stayed up all night piecing together slabs of Styrofoam until he arrived at the design he wanted. “It was a little like that scene in ‘Close Encounters’ where Richard Dreyfuss was building his scale model of Devil’s Mountain,” he said.

When he finished, he took it to local design/build guru Vinny Petrarca, partner in Tonic Design. “It was all pinned together, a one-story house looking out to the lake,” Vinny said. “It was a rhythmic structure.” He came back to George with another model, and the two collaborated on the final design.

The house was to be built in a subdivision overlooking Parkwood Lake, a man-made affair created when a stream was dammed up in the early 1960s. “It was written up in LIFE magazine,” George said. “Parkwood subdivision was going to be its own city. We still have our own fire department.”

“Developers here established this subdivision as the first neighborhood for RTP,” Vinny said. “It’s close to everything – 15 minutes to Durham and Chapel Hill, 18 minutes to the airport, and 25 minutes to Raleigh.”

These days it’s jam-packed with aging 1960s ranchers. There were no lots available when he was looking in 2007, so George bought a 1,600 square foot home with structural problems. He rented it out for a few years, then made the plunge to take it down, salvaging what he could for the local Habitat for Humanity

The new 2,400 square-foot home is sensitive to its neighbors. “This is the first house to be built here in 40 years,” Vinny said. “So we didn’t want to be a big jumbo house, and we set it back even further than the houses on either side.”

It’s sheathed in cedar lap siding painted charcoal gray, with horizontal bands of galvanized steel punctuating every four boards. “That gives it a pinstripe skin,” Vinny said. “It’s an architectural way of breaking the scale down.”

He refers to its roofline as a “hockey stick.” He used eight trusses of fabricated wood and metal to slope the main roof down, and then extended an epay trellis up over the rear deck. “Since we were the designers but also the builders, we wanted to do something in a smart and simple way,” Vinny said. “We wanted to kick it back up to open up the sky. The view is two-thirds sky and one-third lake and trees.”

Inside, an open floor plan runs the length of the home to take advantage of the view from every room with the exception of the guest bedroom. George’s office overlooks the lake, while that of his wife and muse Eleanor Stell, on the opposite side of the house, opens up through sliding glass doors. “Forty percent of the house is glass,” Vinny said. “You can live in this house in a very open way, just like an airport.”

As executive director of Triangle Modernist Homes, which documents, preserves and promotes the nation’s third-largest inventory of mid-century modern structures, George was influenced in the design of his home by the work of a number of RTP modernists, including his father.

“It was like a burst of architectural DNA,” George said. “I seemed to reconnect with all his conversations with architects like Brian Shawcroft, George Matsumoto and Henry Kamphoefner. It all erupted back in the synapses of my brain.”

For more on George Smart and Triangle Modernist Houses, go to http://trianglemodernisthouses.com/

For more on Vinny Petrarca and Tonic Design, go to http://www.tonic-design.com/