Today Architectural Digest travels to the Catskills Mountains in upstate New York to tour the Rock’n’House, a remarkable family home built around a 12,000 year-old-boulder. Some might have found themselves between a rock and a hard place after finding a prehistoric glacial erratic in the middle of their land, but for architect Christian Wassmann, it was just what he was looking for. The boulder became the central feature of Wassmann’s design and is always present in his family’s impressive home–the perfect example of how humans and nature can coexist as one.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 (birds chirping)
00:02 The boulder is always present.
00:11 You see it through triple glass that is curved.
00:14 You see it through a round window in the kitchen.
00:17 You are aware of the boulder,
00:19 even in the spaces that don't have direct views
00:22 because the walls are either radial
00:25 or curved around the center of the rock.
00:27 (gentle music)
00:30 Welcome to the Rockin' House
00:35 in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.
00:38 I designed this and built this
00:46 with the help of local craftspeople
00:48 and it is also my family's home.
00:50 When we found the property,
00:55 this boulder was magically resting
00:57 on the highest spot of the land.
00:59 And we felt this was an invitation
01:03 to design a house right around it.
01:05 That's where everything started.
01:07 We had a compass built and we circled,
01:10 made the first courtyard with a plum,
01:13 a level, and a very long stick.
01:16 (gentle music)
01:18 This house is entirely sustainable.
01:27 It's built out of sustainably harvested wood
01:29 from forests that are certified.
01:32 This is a conical roof clad in solar panels
01:35 and it also produces more energy
01:37 than it will ever consume in the lifespan
01:40 of about 100 to 300 years.
01:42 It harvests all the solar energy
01:45 that we need to run the house
01:47 and it collects also rainwater for a swimming pond.
01:50 Let me show you inside.
02:03 So here we're in the mudroom
02:09 which has seven foot four high ceilings
02:12 and then it slowly gets narrower
02:14 and then it gets wider and wider
02:16 all the way to the main space
02:18 which has in the tip there a 22 foot ceiling.
02:22 The sunken living room was one of these pandemic additions.
02:29 Out of curiosity, I took a pickaxe one night
02:32 and to check how deep the bedrock is
02:34 and found out that it was about four feet.
02:37 This sunken living room has many ways of inhabiting it.
02:41 Here I'm sitting probably the most upright
02:43 and then we have these tetrahedron pillows
02:45 that can serve as headrests.
02:47 There is also the chance that you can go all the way down
02:51 and lay flat onto the bedrock
02:53 and it's a whole different experience
02:55 and actually very cold right now, very comfortable.
02:59 The rock is in the center but in a way
03:05 the geometric center of the house
03:07 that would be pretty much here.
03:10 I think this is very important in this house
03:12 that we wanted to not only make it look in a certain way
03:15 but also function in a perfect way.
03:18 Many moments, many days, many dinner parties
03:21 start on this kitchen island.
03:22 It really is the heart of the house.
03:25 This curved kitchen is built by Jan Kremen,
03:29 a carpenter from the Czech Republic.
03:31 The transition to then a dining
03:34 or a more formal sit down is very fluid.
03:37 It's in the same space.
03:39 The space gets a little taller
03:41 and here we have this rectangular table.
03:43 A custom made fireplace that I designed
03:51 to come straight out of the ceiling.
03:53 This triple glass is the maximum size
04:00 that would fit in an ocean container.
04:02 It came from Germany and it had like an inch on the bottom
04:06 and on the top of the shipping container.
04:09 (gentle music)
04:11 The rock also has very different personalities.
04:13 When you see it from down here,
04:15 it almost feels like a neck or the kids call it ET
04:19 because ET's face, head looks very much like that.
04:22 In a winter storm it feels you're inside a snow globe
04:27 but also it has a little bit of an aquarium feeling.
04:30 You can experience it very differently
04:31 from one day to another, from one moment,
04:34 from one hour to the next.
04:36 (birds chirping)
04:38 I hope the boulder likes the attention.
04:40 Yeah, I think he was a little lonely
04:42 for 12,000 years till we found him or he found us.
04:46 So it's a glacial erratic that was dropped here
04:49 about 12,000 years ago in the last ice age.
04:52 The way these rocks fell is really how we found it.
04:55 We like living with him
04:57 and I think his trees are growing well,
04:59 his moss is growing so I think he's a happy boulder.
05:05 This is my home office where I often sit and sketch.
05:08 It also has the model of the house that we built.
05:11 Shows you all the rooms, how they relate radial to the rock.
05:16 So with each door to one of the spaces,
05:20 Lorenzo's bedroom, laundry room, powder room,
05:23 guest apartment, Kiki's bedroom,
05:26 each door makes the main space three feet wider.
05:30 And all the windows that look relatively wild
05:33 have again something to do with the rock.
05:37 We have 64 segments that built this house,
05:40 64 pizza slices as we call them.
05:43 The house is the passstück between you and nature
05:52 where you really set the windows exactly
05:55 where they help you to inhabit the interior
05:58 in the most comfortable or most exciting way.
06:01 (birds chirping)
06:03 When I sit here on my desk,
06:05 I wanted to have the view through the window
06:08 on my eye level.
06:09 Same in my bedroom,
06:14 we wanted the window very low to the ground
06:16 in order to be able to sit on, but also to look outside.
06:21 This led to a relatively wild layout from the outside
06:25 that only makes sense once you inhabit the building inside.
06:30 All of our projects in one way or another
06:33 start in a sketchbook, models and sketchbooks.
06:36 We're trying not to waste anything.
06:39 So even the kitchen window here,
06:41 which is a round window in the concrete wall
06:43 became the fire pit of the fireplace.
06:46 This is my daughter's room.
06:50 She has the view from her bed
06:52 out to the east side, sunrise.
06:56 She wanted a big desk,
06:57 which can change as she expands her crafty projects.
07:02 My client, in this case, my daughter
07:05 was very happy with this design.
07:07 Kiki shares the bathroom with her brother, Lorenzo.
07:13 They also, at some point,
07:14 they were like desiring outdoor shower.
07:17 And so I came up with the idea of getting a shower
07:20 that is draining directly into the concrete slab.
07:24 And it has a big window where they can open the window
07:28 and they can shower pretty much with nature outside.
07:33 This is my son, Lorenzo's room.
07:39 He's the lucky one who got a window
07:42 that is large enough that it becomes a door
07:45 so he can eventually escape
07:47 and has his own little private garden out here.
07:51 (gentle music)
07:54 I wanted to have our bedrooms all facing east.
08:00 So both kids have east exposure and our bedroom.
08:03 And the guest apartment is more northwest facing.
08:07 The bathroom is again, a relatively compressed space
08:12 compared to the very tall bedroom.
08:14 But then it has a nice little surprise
08:17 that you can look down into the main space.
08:21 You smell the coffee in the morning already.
08:23 You can always call down and be connected
08:25 to the main action in the house.
08:28 (gentle music)
08:49 We wanted the guests also feel independent from us.
08:53 So it's actually a guest apartment.
08:55 And then we have a built-in couch.
09:00 All these beams were prefabricated and engineered
09:04 to actually built in a sofa
09:06 that takes advantage of the structure itself.
09:08 And it is high enough to be comfortable on the dining table.
09:15 (gentle music)
09:17 This is our Polaris Stair
09:19 that also has a handrail that points double functioning
09:24 as a naked eye observatory where you see Polaris at night.
09:28 (gentle music)
09:31 This explains the idea of the stair.
09:35 This is the axis of the earth.
09:37 So it's a 42 degree steep stair with a handrail
09:41 that double functions as a naked eye observatory
09:45 of the North Star.
09:47 (gentle music)
09:49 This is the guest's bedroom with a king-size bed
09:54 and North exposure and the skylight to the South.
09:58 Here you can stargaze on this Charlotte Perrillon
10:02 and Le Corbusier chaise longue.
10:05 (gentle music)
10:07 (birds chirping)
10:10 And you can also open it up and look out into the sky.
10:21 (gentle music)
10:25 The roof is cone-shaped.
10:33 We placed the roof in a way that the largest surface
10:36 is exposed around four o'clock,
10:39 the time when the grid is most used.
10:43 So these shingles by SunStyle are three foot squares.
10:47 They're all overlapping.
10:48 So it forms this kind of dragon scale,
10:51 holds the water out,
10:52 and each one of them produces about 80 watts.
10:56 All together, we produce 18,000 per year.
10:59 The house uses about 8,000 kilowatt hours.
11:02 So we have 10,000 extra for an electric car
11:05 and the rest we donate to the grid.
11:07 Because we wanted cross ventilation
11:14 to have as much natural air as possible,
11:17 each facade has windows in it.
11:19 So to contrast the curtain wall on the South side
11:29 and part of the East,
11:31 we continue with a very traditional barn material,
11:34 a board and batten facade.
11:35 You can see already how the color is shifting.
11:38 It's local pine that turns like a silverish gray.
11:41 In my studio, we try to live by this mantra
11:48 that everything that we design
11:50 connects individuals to each other,
11:53 to themselves, and then to the cosmos.
11:55 The cosmos can be nature directly around you,
11:59 but it can also be the sun
12:01 and various other star constellations
12:03 and the ocean, if there is an ocean,
12:06 or in our case here, the rock,
12:08 which is also all stardust in the end.
12:10 Cosmic architecture goes back
12:13 to thousands of years of architecture
12:15 where old temples, even very simple monuments,
12:19 were aligned with usually the sun as the strongest force.
12:24 After studying and traveling to many temples and monuments,
12:29 I realized that it was time
12:32 to incorporate this also into more regular architecture.
12:36 So why could it not be in a private house?
12:39 That's the challenge,
12:39 and that's what sets some of this cosmic architecture apart
12:44 from non-cosmic architecture,
12:47 that you do have this goal
12:49 to ultimately connect to something larger
12:51 than what is directly around you.
12:53 If a building can make you aware of this,
12:58 I think it's amazing.
13:00 (gentle music)
13:02 I certainly am obsessed with geometry.
13:06 We started stacking out the 50 by 50 square,
13:09 and the first move was that we actually offset it
13:12 by golden ratios.
13:14 It's the proportion that appears in nature in many plants,
13:17 but also in the human body.
13:19 As an architect, you're always looking forward.
13:24 You're not just designing for who you are now,
13:27 but you're designing for who you want to become.
13:30 (gentle music)
13:32 We built this house with the goal
13:35 that it will hold a lifetime,
13:38 maybe the lifetime of my kids,
13:40 and hopefully even till the next ice age.
13:42 This is the latest edition by my son,
13:49 who turned 12 and he built this tree house with his friends.
13:52 I helped them building the zip line
13:54 and tested it also for its safety.
13:57 It should be fine.
13:59 Ready?
14:00 That's my house.
14:11 (gentle music)
14:14 (gentle music)
14:16 (gentle music)
14:19 (wind whooshing)