Paplin earned her master’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia and does much of her work in New York City, Her first project in the area, a 2006 cottage renovation for a client in Woodstock. led to a residential renovation project in Phoenicia that satisfied Paplin’s credo for reconnecting the past with the way we live today.
“The house in Phoenicia was really a mish-mash, a carpenter’s special,” Paplin says. “It was originally a very simple kind of cabin built in the Fifties, but added on to in that gradual way that happens.”
Nothing in the house was developed in a way that made sense, she says. Many of the changes done to the house made for awkward living. A kitchen peninsula with fixed bar stools allowed very little clearance to get past them, and yet a person had to go through that area to get anywhere else in the house.
“Then there was this sort of catwalk balcony in the area that the kitchen was in that led to a room where you stepped down into it and could barely stand.” Paplin and her team kept the catwalk, but rebuilt it as a simple balcony, opening up the space completely so it could flow properly. The kitchen floor was concrete (with radiant heat) and the countertops wrapped with zinc sheet, chemically-treated to achieve a verdigris finish.
The renovation involved using a lot of reclaimed wood, including three types of pine, wormy oak and chestnut, along with pine mill flooring, a live edge oak slab and antique oak. (“It was like a festival of wood,” says Paplin.) The exterior was re-clad with wavy-edged board typical of the region.
The original house had utilized a lot of wood in its rustic design, but neither the materials nor workmanship were of good quality, says Paplin. “You could see what they were reaching for, but we brought very good-quality carpenters in there, including somebody who’d been trained in Japanese joinery techniques who used that knowledge to inform how things were put together.” (Japanese carpentry is characterized by the use of interlocking joints created without the use of nails, screws, or power tools.)
At the threshold to the dining room, a framework was built of reclaimed hand-hewn oak barn beams. “The idea behind that was almost as though we’d found this skeleton of the old house in the walls and had exposed it,” says Paplin. “And in fact, we did find the remains of the frame of the original house in about that location, so in a way it was like we were making a fiction that gives it a kind of mythology.”
Ultimately, the work’s about finding the potential in what may seem at first to be an unpromising space, says Paplin. “I’m trying to meet the client wherever they are in terms of their ability to conceive of spaces and what they want, and then use my knowledge to make that a reality. I’m not designing something ideal that I think is for me, I’m always designing for them.”
A redo
Stephanie Bassler and Peter Reynolds co-founded North River Architecture & Planning in Stone Ridge four years ago after working together at another firm. Bassler, principal of NRAP and Reynolds, senior designer, have a design portfolio as eclectic as the varied tastes of the Hudson Valley residents they build for, encompassing everything from the local vernacular that reflects the origins of the region (stone Dutch-style houses) to the arts-and-crafts style. The bulk of their work involves custom design. Common to all of their projects is an emphasis on energy efficiency and sustainable practices.
“Sustainable design is about making houses that are flexible enough to be adaptable to what happens down the road as families grow or change,” Reynolds says. “Part of our strategy is to design houses that have a simple, iconic kind of plan that can be easily adapted or added onto.”
A few years back, the architect and designer got a chance to prove their concept when a house they’d built just outside Stone Ridge some years earlier burned to the ground. The owners wanted to rebuild on the site.
