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Home in a Meadow   l   Morrisville, Vermont

Featured in the book ‘Outside the Not So Big House’ by Sarah Susanka, best-selling author and award-winning architect.  
Published in 'New England Home' magazine, November 2013.

With majestic views of mountains and meadows, this stunning property integrates the owners’ fondness of Prairie-style architecture with their love of Japanese gardens. The result is a truly seamless composition of house, landscape and views.  A palette of textures, patterns, colors and scales borrowed from the surrounding forest and meadow provides a feeling of intimacy with nature both indoors and out.

Creative techniques are used to catch stormwater runoff. A rill of smooth, black beach pebbles below the roof’s dripline and rain gardens featuring native ferns and groundcover collected from the property’s forest provide both function and beauty.  Vermont-quarried green and purple-hued slate in the foyer, screened porch and outdoor terraces reflects the muted colors in the meadows and mountains that extend beyond the architectural landscape. A butterfly garden of native Vermont flowers creates a transition from the screened porch to the surrounding meadow of wildflowers, which offers a view of lupines, daisies, cornflowers, and asters that shifts with the season. As author of Outside the Not So Big House, Sarah Susanka, writes, “The sequence of places makes a continuous necklace around and through the house, and it’s this collection that creates the feeling of home.”

Collaboration with Architect / Author Sarah Susanka 
Photography by Jim Westphalen