Process

Hynansky House

8,000 SF
Greenville, Delaware

The client is an entre­pre­neur who desired a mod­ern addi­tion and ren­o­va­tion as part of his plans to expand his home as a place to live and enter­tain friends and relatives.

Because there was an exist­ing struc­ture, the new design became a project about expand­ing, remov­ing, and graft­ing new struc­tures where needed. The goal of these oper­a­tions was to open up the house to new vis­tas and con­nec­tions to the land­scape as well as to carve out new expan­sive inte­rior spaces. More

From the foyer, a set of splayed stairs lead a half level up to a large liv­ing room clad on all sur­faces in a dark oak wood veneer. The butt-joined glass wall enclos­ing this room is detailed to over­lap the roof and floor struc­tures allow­ing unob­structed views both in and out. A fire­place extends through a long, nar­row sky­light, reveal­ing the wood veneer as a “skin” applied to the inte­rior sur­face of the room.

Directly out­side, the pool area with its var­i­ous spaces for loung­ing and recre­ation vir­tu­ally extends the spa­tial sequence started in the liv­ing room. Intended to be an “exte­rior room”, this area, dur­ing mild sea­sons, refo­cuses as the cen­ter of the house. As part of an ide­al­ized gar­den, a sin­gle Japan­ese maple tree, exist­ing from the orig­i­nal house, was reframed onto a highly man­i­cured lawn, giv­ing it new life.

In terms of mate­ri­als, the intent was to reem­pha­size the beauty of some mate­ri­als from the orig­i­nal house. In par­tic­u­lar the orig­i­nal stonework was pre­served where pos­si­ble and became part of a new con­tin­u­ous base around the house. New stonework was used in both the old man­ner and a new, more con­tem­po­rary wall veneer sys­tem made from schist stone pan­els. All the exte­rior cedar wood was stained to a warm tone and win­dows were fin­ished in a sim­i­lar tone in mahogany wood.