The client, Nick Schiffer of NS Builders, approached us with a simple yet big ambition. He wanted to redefine what “builder grade” means for the construction and real estate market in New England and across the United States. Nick had spent the past decade building custom homes and interiors for his private clients and asked us to design the first home for his new development company.

Typically a home that is designed and built to sell on the market without a home owner as the client from the beginning results in a minimum viable product for the maximum return and lowest risk to the developer. Nick wanted to challenge this status quo and offer a genuinely high-performance and exceptionally designed home built with his uncompromising craftsmanship. Such a product challenges preconceptions in the market and changes home buyers’ expectations for design and construction in the future.

The architecture of the home is an idea familiar to the traditional New England residential landscape and contemporary living. The building is at once a compact form with a direct and simple building envelope containing a wide variety of interior spaces that range from continuously flowing and open to positioned discreetly, privately, and intimately. The spaces within the building continually open inward between rooms and outward into the landscape. This is a sense of home that is both forward looking and deeply familiar from a historic, even archaic, past.