Roxbury Forest House

In June of 2020, my wife and I decided to move out of NYC. We’ve been living in NYC for 15 years and covid made us realize we wanted to live closer to nature. We drew a 90 minute circle around NYC, rented a car and drove all around: PA, Upstate NY, Western Mass and CT.

Initially, we were looking for a house, however, most houses on the market in the northeastern US are colonial style and at least 35 years old. We expanded our search to plots of land. The first piece of land we saw was a huge hilly and forested piece deep down a private gravel road in Roxbury CT. We walked up an old logger’s trail on the property, crossing a creek, settling at a plateau surrounded by rocky hills. It was exactly where we wanted to live.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with a forest preserve as a backyard. The forest was my favorite place. When I was young, I saw the movie Ferris Bueller's day off. One of the characters: Cameron's house is a steel and glass modern that cantilevers over a forest ravine. It has been my dream to build a similar secluded house canopied by the forest.

Because I'm a creative polymath autodidact, I wanted a reasonably large sized workshop where I can focus on all of my existing projects - and new projects that I haven't had the space for yet. I want to start experimenting with larger scale projects like large sculpture building, machine building, and robotics. I wanted it to be a separate structure, far enough from the house that it would be a walk to get there.

After interviewing a bunch of architects, I went with Julio Salcedo Fernandez of Scalar Architects. Their group has experience designing modern projects, both residential and commercial. After the designs were firm, we chose Lambert and Barr as the contractors because of their diligence on the project and the very positive references.