Sometimes it helps to have a client who’s been trained as an architect.

That’s what Cecilia Nichols of Charlottesville, Va.- based Formwork found when she designed developer Carl Frischkorn’s home at Wild Rock, a new community overlooking the New River Gorge near Fayetteville, W. Va.

Frischkorn had studied with Michael Graves at Princeton, graduating in 1975.  “He was much less reticent than the typical client,” she says.  “He speaks the language, he’s renovated houses and built new houses before, and in general he was quite open to the new.”

Moreover, he wanted a house that was distinctly modern, but not a rebuke of its place or the materials and typology of the rural West Virginia landscape.  “We started out with a rural arrangement of several volumes, but stepped back to consolidate,” she says.

They wanted a hard-material, modernist shell for the single structure’s exterior, and lucked into an abundant supply of oily-grade heart pine at nearby Mountain Lumber.  Salvaged from a textile mill in Georgia where machinery had been lubricated regularly with vegetable oil, it was basically steeped in the stuff all the way through.  They used it for an exterior skin, in random widths.

“It’s gorgeous, and we didn’t have to finish it,” she says.  “The grain is very tight, and very straight.”

Inside, the home was designed to accommodate the client’s collection of works by West Virginia artists and artisans.  “He knew he’d be entertaining, with a lot of conversations about West Virginia,” she says.

With the advent of the economic downturn, Formwork has been engaged in interior design work, with an architectural component.  At the Cliff House, they were fully engaged as consultants.

“To me, it’s all part of the same continuum, so why shouldn’t I help with some of the decisions?” she says.  “He came with questions like the best layout for the living room.  I’d sketch it out and he’d send pictures and ask what we thought.”

When it came to furnishings, though, each came from a different school of thought.  “We were kind of the design police,” she says.  “He’s eclectic and we’re more minimalists.  He’s more quirky, more colorful, with kind of a wiggle to it.”

Wiggle and all, their Cliff House is a well-furnished modernist gem, perched atop a 900-foot drop down to the New River.

Tomorrow: How the view and the slope guided the home’s siting.

For more information on Wild Rock, go to http://www.wildrockwv.com/

For more information on formwork, go to http://formworkusa.com/

[slideshow id=934]