Water Mill House

This 2,000 square foot addition to an existing 3-bedroom house in Water Mill, New York transforms a standard 30′ X 30′ developer house into a horizontal composition that anchors it to its two-acre wooded site. The image of the house was upgraded and new program elements were added, including a screened-in porch, two-car garage, entry porch, and exterior terraces. By raising the existing offset gable roof and recomposing the facades, MWA created a double-height living volume that connects the structure with the landscape and allows greater amounts of daylight to penetrate deep into the space. The newly relocated kitchen opens onto the double-height living/dining space that opens to the exterior by full-height, wall-to-wall sliding glass doors. A series of terraces step down from the living room level to the pool integrating the house with the landscape. The clear cedar cladding on the ground floor links the lower level of the main house with the new mahogany screened-in porch and garage addition that extends horizontally from the house. The bedrooms are enclosed in a black-stained second-story volume above.