S PAC E
BUILDING A MYSTERY
An eccentric, sustainable New Canaan, Connecticut, town house is filled with surprises and creature comforts.
couldn’t go more than 45 linear feet without a bend in the plane. A side wall that’s 50 feet can’t be perfectly straight, so there are a couple of bends in the exterior walls of the home. A metal box that juts out was allowed on the second story, not the first.” The radical town house, completed in two-and-ahalf years, has four different facades, combining metal, glass and wood, smooth and textured surfaces, a zinc container around the second-story north windows bursting into space (Moore likens the effect to origami). The 5,000-square-foot structure was created with a daring shape—a couple of forms joined by a glass membrane, like two sides of a brain. The left, wooden side contains all the water elements of the home—kitchen, bathrooms— while the right, metal side is given over to bedrooms, living and dining spaces. “This is more than sculpture,” Moore says. “It’s another way of being in a house, of being in the world.” Elaborating upon the building’s dramatic structural divide, he offers:
At first, the plan was to create a row house, “a New Orleanstype town house,” says David Prutting, the founder, along with his wife of 46 years, Deborah, of Prutting + Company, an award-winning custom building firm based in Stamford, Connecticut, and Millerton, New York. “The idea was to produce an in-town, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, bestof-the-best house in New Canaan. As builders, it was an opportunity to show what we’d learned.” The Pruttings called upon architect Joeb Moore of Joeb Moore & Partners, a lauded Greenwich, Connecticut-based architect with whom they’d collaborated for two decades. Moore’s structures channel literary, ethereal concepts such as wonder, doubt and mystery. Each of the firm’s spaces is executed with masterful attention to palette, scale and the highest-grade, environmentally responsible materials. Together, the team weighed what could be constructed on the less-than-1-acre lot, factoring in the village’s many ordinances. “There were interesting ones we’d never heard of,” Prutting says, “challenges unique to the village, like you 54
Courtesy of Prutting + Company
BY JIM SERVIN
