Architectural Record 2015-04

76
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD APRIL 2015 BUILDING TYPE STUDY RECORD HOUSES
spaces on top of the kitchen and living room. Dappled, ever-changing light
streams through 5-foot-wide glass panes set in an aluminum system. The living
room, to the east, seems to be floating in the forest. Above it, a glass balustrade
protects a second-floor mezzanine. The feeling of being enveloped in the forest is
heightened by the fact that the windows extend a couple of inches above the
slightly dropped hemlock ceiling. This space was originally going to contain the
master bedroom until Lehoux realized that the view—and the feeling of being in
a treehouse—was too magical to waste on a room used for sleeping (the master
bedroom is instead at the western end of the house).
In contrast, the house’s northern volume is mostly solid, clad in shiplap cedar
and painted with svarttjära, a traditional durable Swedish coating made from pine
tar. Narrow glazed incisions amplify the horizontal form, which contains a stair
connecting the two floors. Wood slats make up a wall that encloses the stairwell,
topped with an operable skylight, and similar slats are used to screen off the
living room from the hallway, in a nod to Japanese design. “It gives a sense of
openness and privacy at the same time,” says Miller.
Called the Lightbox, in part because of Lehoux’s profession and also because it
glows at night, the house contains many references—to Charles and Ray Eames’s
house in Pacific Palisades, California; the DIY hippie houses of Christiania, in
Copenhagen (particularly one made of recycled windows); and the farm buildings
and pole barns of Miller’s native northwestern Pennsylvania. “Seven or eight years
ago, [Miller] gave me this magazine called Rural Builder,” says Lehoux, who grew