Rogers House
Sewanee, Tennessee
Completed 2005
Gooch Beasely Contractors

We situated this house for my mother just uphill from a low rock outcropping, bending it to conform to the contours of the site.  The one story part of the house is only one room deep with a corridor along the front, lined with shelves, windows and cabinets, The corridors from the front door and from the carport overlap to form a dining room by the kitchen which has become the gathering place of the house. Connecting the two-story bedroom wing is a stairway enlivened by the interplay of different angles of the two parts of the house.

The truncated stonework on the front was inspired by a local “ruin.”  But as that height was repeated inside with the interior stonework and cabinets, it became a symboll of the flat-topped Cumberland Plateau itself.  The stone gutter along the ground in front embrace the process of moving off rain water, sending it under the carport and eventually to the stream at the base of the site.  The shed dormer lets light into the large walk-in attic as well as to the kitchen below.  The roofs of the carport and screened porch, liberated from the main house, twist and curve, mainly because they look really cool that way.