Projects

Modern Take on Work-Life Balance

Architect Marica McKeel’s Hudson Valley project puts a whole new spin on working from home.

Set high on a rocky hill, accessible by a steep, switchback crushed gravel drive a mile or so off a twisting county road, sits a modern marvel of a home, an office, and a bunk house, all rolled into one.

Designed by architect and Studio MM founder, Marica McKeel, the project (dubbed “Via 43”) is a collection and blend of intentional and dedicated spaces. On one side of the main structure is a two-story home for her and her husband. The other half — connected by a bright, art-filled, gallery-style hallway — is a separate office and studio space for her business, her co-workers, and her practice. Completing the buildings is a standalone, glass-walled, home-away-from-home for visitors and her team to spend the night.

But for as remarkable as these contemporary, glass-forward jewels look from the outside, from the inside, they were designed, built, sited, and situated with one thing in mind: the view.

“This house is really about the land,” McKeel said.

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Project Team

Design: Studio MM Architect

Builder: Cherry Hill Construction

Dealer: Harbrook

The land in question? A west-facing look at the southern edge of the Catskills, including Peekamoose Mountain, rising up over the densely forested, impossibly green (for most of the year anyway) terrain. It’s the sort of Hudson Valley hilltop scene you read about in dog-eared novels and see in classic Upstate oil paintings.

For McKeel, to design the home and office with anything else top of mind would’ve done a disservice to the lot’s power and potential. “You're here to see the outdoors,” she said. “It's not necessarily that ‘blurred line,’ but this continuous space between indoors and out.”

To take her design beyond just that blurred line of what’s an inside and an outside space and instead create a truly open-air connection, McKeel turned to the modular system of the Marvin Modern collection of windows and doors.

“One of the things that we love about the Modern windows in this house is that you really can't see which panels are the doors and which panels are the fixed windows,” McKeel said. “We've had people come in and say, ‘I didn't realize that was a [Multi-Slide] door,’ mainly because it's so large, with the way it’s integrated, and how it doesn't have big mullions showing you which is the door. It’s much more seamless with Modern.”

“One of the things that we love about the Modern windows in this house is that you really can't see which panels are the doors and which panels are the fixed windows. We've had people come in and say, ‘I didn't realize that was a [Multi-slide] door,’ mainly because it's so large, with the way it’s integrated, and how it doesn't have big mullions showing you which is the door. It’s much more seamless with Modern.” ”

Marica McKeel

Owner and Architect, Studio MM

From its well-considered separation of home and office to its flow between spaces, the thoughtful design of Via 43 is nothing short of its views: spectacular.

For more about this project, including its stunning rooftop garden, how it’s the place for gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, and how McKeel’s “commute” is different these days, take a look at this case study video.

Case Study Video

Case Study Video Transcript

Marica McKeel, Owner and Architect, Studio MM: One of the characteristics of a lot of our homes is this bringing the outside in. I mean, after all, we are in the Hudson Valley, most of our clients are in the Hudson Valley, and so you're here to see the outdoors.

So, when I designed the home, I knew that it was going to be not only for my husband and me to live, but also for my office. So, it was designed as two separate volumes so that when you come into the space, there's a private side, and then there's the public side, which has the guest room and the office space.

There are a lot of times when I was the one directing the design, I would say, but it was very important to me to make sure that it was his house, too. My husband wanted a second floor, so what we did was pulled the bedroom back. So, you're reading less volume on the front, you're reading more linear lines, and so as you approach, you really do get that line of the living room. So that's what you see first. And then as you approach the front door, then we do have those volumes back there. But we've used a lattice in one area where you walk up the stairs to the roof deck, so you're kind of using texture and windows to break up the facade so it's not just these two masses. 

One of the coolest things that we did was the rooftop garden, and that is right outside of our bedroom. The reason for that garden is because of that shift back with the second floor so that we get that horizontal line, but what that does is that just gives you a lot of roof to look at from the second floor. But the way that changes over time through the seasons turned out to be even more special than we thought it was going to be.

The office is one of the most important spaces in the house. We knew it would be a place for the studio to come and be able to have a hub when they were going to their projects in the Hudson Valley. During construction, we actually realized that we were going to move our entire office upstate, and so we were no longer going to have a place in the city. So, it suddenly became a place for five people to come to work.

One thing that was really important to me when designing my office into my home was that there was definitely a separation between office and home life. And so the gallery space in between, it's also the entry gallery, but that gallery becomes my commute to work. So that's a way for me to come down from the bedroom, get my coffee in the morning, and then walk across there to work. It really emphasizes that separation, and it's something that has also been successful in this house.

The bunkhouse really came about because I needed a place for my team to be able to come up and stay. The woman who was working with me on the design for this house showed this very thin profile of a roof and all this glass. So, we're going to figure out how to do this as an office, we're going to all work together, collaborate. We figured it out. We brought the structure in, and so you'll see these windows continue up past the ceiling. So they go up to the roof, and then the ceiling is dropped. So the structure is held up by columns that are brought inside, and then we just tied the roof into that structure and it can stick out over the windows and be eight inches, be that thin profile.

One of the most important things in the Hudson Valley and where we are designing is thermal capacity of the windows, especially because we have walls of windows. So that's something that's really important to us, something that we really have to think about. So we decided to use Marvin Modern windows for this house. Of course, with the Modern line, what I love is that I can get very large windows, so I don't have to have as many breaks in the glass. I wasn't limited by the operable window size. I could really make that whatever I wanted. So, the rhythm was much easier with Modern, so we could just really keep whatever rhythm we wanted with the glass.

The inspiration for this house is really about the land. It's about where we are in the Hudson Valley. It's gorgeous woods, it's gorgeous land, but it really has this gorgeous view of the Catskills. Kind of feels like you're in this getaway every time we come home, with the really long driveway. It's really special.