Beverly Kerzner A country house always wanted. In addition, I had met the architect and designer Niels Schoenfelder more than 20 years ago. At that time, he was 24 years old and had already built an impressive hotel in Pondicherry, in India, which caught his attention. After tracking him and starting a fruitful conversation, he contacted him to Build the house of your dreams.
«From the beginning, Niels and I pressed each other. It was always a conversation, or a long debate, to know the terrain,» says Kerzner. He spent years perfecting his vision with the young German architect to The country house I had in mind.
In 2017 he bought a large land in the Hudson Valley, in the state of New York. The extensive landscape of the hill contained two impressive barn structures, a river that crosses the property, a cabin and a residential house. As in the distant regions close to Pondicherry, it was a landscape that had to be appreciated, working and understanding: «I immediately knew that Niels was the one for the project«, remember.
The following four years were a whole process: they got out of innumerable iterations of the Casa de Campo. Meanwhile, the pre -existing residential house (a strangely located cabin that would soon be demolished) served as temporary housing for Kerzner, its two daughters and, often, Schoenfelder. «It was a disguised blessing, because it gave me time to know exactly what I wanted.»
Soon, visiting the farm became an adventure: one never knew when Schoenfelder was going to be planted in the middle of the garden in his wooden desk, outlining a revised version of the clay room. Most likely, Kerzner was close, squeezing, or simply wandering in the midst of his thoughts. During the frequent dinners, every detail of the property of 51 hectares became an intellectually stimulating debate: Wood or stone beams? Three bedrooms or four?
Time revealed to the smallest of needs. As the napkins piled up at the foot of the stairs of the cabin every night, it was clear that a duct for dirty clothes hidden in the kitchen was an absolute need. After contemplating the antiestétic Black cat trio became another.
The resulting design is a distillation of the Earth that had come to be known inside and outside: a Modern structure inspired by a barn and meticulously elaborated to fit perfectly in their environment. Initially, the house was going to be installed in the main barn, but when it was considered unfeasible from the structural point of view, Schoenfelder emulated the sensation through high height roofs And intelligent details, such as the main bathroom, where the bathtub is perfectly in a rounded corner as if it were in a silo. In other places, the wood recovered from the demolished cabin is located along the walls of the mud room and the dressing table. The walls and stone details are inspired by the rocks of the River of Property: «The most important thing was to get the right scale between the buildings, the new house and these old barns, because they are really very special,» says Schoenfelder. «We didn't want to make the same mistake as [era evidente en] The old house, which was to be really disconnected: there was no flow. «