by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

How do you . . . design a volumetrically succinct house that reflects different residential architecture needs though varying façade materials and expressions?

Summary: The Kowalewski Residence in Atlantic Beach, N.Y., is a Modernist house that presents three distinct faces of varying transparency and material composition that each respond to site context and the clients’ desires. As a modest, compact design, the house refers back to the original Art Deco and Tudor style homes first built in Atlantic Beach and stands in opposition to the sprawling McMansions that have sprung up in the town more recently.

The Kowalewski Residence in Long Island, designed by New York City architect Belmont Freeman, AIA, is very much a continuation of his urban loft-influenced work but is also a break from the past. It’s Freeman’s first full-time-residence freestanding project, liberated from the exterior masonry walls of Tribeca and Midtown, finally giving Freeman an opportunity to express his outward conceptions of contemporary Modern dwelling space.

And, as such, the house doesn’t settle for a single gesture. In response to its site context and clients’ desires, the Kowalewski Residence assembles three distinctive façades that are alternately winking and bashful, grounding and calming, and embracing and comforting; all well adjusted into a proportional and balanced composition.

Shrinking into scale
Freeman’s three story house is located in Atlantic Beach, N.Y., near the ocean. It’s 3,500 square feet above grade, with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a complete third floor guest suite. The house stands in sharp contrast to its neighbors. The surrounding building stock is made up of modest Art Deco and Tudor style homes from the 1920s and 30s that Freeman calls “rather cute.” He also calls them “undervalued” and “ignored.” Lately, these houses have been deemed teardowns, and residents have started building bloated McMansions that sometimes consume and spread across two 80x85-foot lots.

So, Freeman and his eponymous firm wanted to design a house that worked at the original scale and proportion of the town’s first homes. “I wanted a fairly compact, tight house,” he says. “It is quite a distinctive difference from the sprawling houses people are building.”

The Kowalewski House (complete since September of 2007) is succinctly Modern and self-contained. From certain angles, it’s nearly a perfect cube, and it preserves much of the lot for garden space. A black slate slot in the white façade that runs the height of the house gives the appearance of two asymmetrical rectangular volumes fusing together. Freeman says the house’s flat roof, materials (white stucco is the primary facing material) and clean detailing are sub-textual references to the area’s Art Deco heritage.

Three faces
Another subtle Art Deco reference is the porthole window in the west façade. It’s the residence’s most engaging and expressive feature in an otherwise austere and monumental design. This street-front side is mostly closed and private to the cars that drive by, with two windows in the black slate slot and the circular porthole window. Freeman had originally intended to provide only one small window on the western elevation, but construction complications caused him to have to raise the house above the town’s height restrictions. To win approval for this, the client had to get all his neighbors to sign off on the small discrepancy between the house and the building codes. All but one woman, insulted by the house’s raw minimalism as it faced the street, agreed, so a compromise had to be arrived at in the town council, says Freeman, which required him to add more windows to this façade.

Now, Freeman says he prefers the newer design. The asymmetrical placement of the porthole window keeps interior life private but also contributes a playful, winking quality to the street. At once, it’s the house’s most reserved and yet enigmatic face. Freeman isn’t too concerned with conceptual justifications for the window beyond this. “You can always say [it’s a] nautical motif for a seaside community,” he says.

The north face of the building is a calming and orienting initial arrival space. It contains the front door and is adjacent to the driveway and garage. The entire house sits on a base of black slate, but the north façade extends this cool, slick stone up through the first floor. Three small windows peer into the second story, and the west side of this elevation has a bank of horizontal frosted and clear windows that run the entire height of the house and look into its lone stairwell. This façade has the richest diversity of geometries and materials of all sides, serving to acclimate and preview the domestic life of the house for those about to enter it.

The south face of the house isn’t nearly so coy and cautious. Here, the first floor is walled in only by windows, revealing its open loft floor plan. Beyond the windows is more private domestic space: a side garden, preserved by the house’s small footprint. Four additional windows are on the second floor, as well as a bedroom balcony. Cloistered by more opaque façades, this window wall creates a continuity of domestic warmth and comfort between the activity inside the house and outside the house in the garden.

The house’s east façade is relatively blank, though its entrance is recessed under an overhanging section supported by two columns, and black slate again covers the first floor.

Contemporary needs
Inside the first floor, Freeman has taken his experience with urban loft spaces to the suburbs—an ironic twist for his clients (a couple with two children) who moved to Long Island from New York City. The open floor plan features dark stained oak floors and lots of well-lighted wall space for the clients’ collection of Eastern European contemporary art. The second floor has a simple floor plan as well. Four bedrooms on the south side lie across a hallway from two bathrooms, with an additional bathroom tucked in next to the stairway. The house’s floating wood staircase lies behind the frosted glass window array that glows at night. Supported lithely by a steel tube, it suggests a hovering ascendance into a glowing cloud.

The three most expressive faces of the Kowalewski Residence are not arbitrary jokers’ masks on a revolving wheel, but instead careful and reasoned responses to the way contemporary families want their homes to function: as outward gestures to engage the world at large, as decompressing and reorienting transitions from the exterior world, and, as always, domestic hearths, enlivened by everyday acts of family life.