Paladin Base

Here is a home that celebrates second chances. This sweeping romantic shingle style home is a glorious renovation born from a vanilla midcentury neo-traditional home sited on a pastoral nine-acre parcel at the base of Paris Mountain. The renovation began as an exercise in figuring out what the home wanted to be. Its simple long-and-low profile and absence of a strong entry feature made the riddle surprisingly easy to solve. The building forms that appear in the shingle style present, in their understated way, the best of everything in American domestic architecture. They are instantly at home at the waterfront, the mountains and the countryside. The style’s informality and energetic restlessness allows for comfortably combining shingle features with simple horizontal lap siding thus allowing some of the home’s existing components to remain.  Central to the design is a prominent new front porch and entry, punctuated by a grand shingled gable with deeply recessed clerestory windows.

With exterior resolved, the interior layout was one in which the elimination of awkwardly compartmentalized spaces achieved a more cohesively open plan.  In the home, an inviting entry begins a series of seamlessly interconnected family-centric spaces including a generous naturally illuminated kitchen, great room, family dining area and den.  In the end, a home that had been easily dismissed by passers-by became a newly desirable landmark.