_Dream Home

_The Ansley Park, Glass House, USA
The Ansley Glass House is located in an historic downtown neighborhood, with a mature tree canopy and direct views to the immediate city skyline. The project replaces a series of additions to a 1910-era house with a new glass-lined living space including a garage, kitchen, family room, library, and a new stair linking three levels. The structure is capped with an occupiable roof deck surrounded by glass guardrails and clerestories, offering diagonal sightlines up to the midtown skyscrapers beyond and into the living spaces below.

The clients expressed a strong desire to have their domestic spaces perceptually lodged in the out-of-doors, and to have the visceral presence of the city skyline both night and day. The interior spaces are arranged as a series of split-levels, each spiraling around a new central stair. The stair, with no visible stringers, is suspended from adjacent and overhead structure, and uppermost rooms are cantilevered and suspended over lower ones. This spatial arrangement is in stark contrast to the historic front half of the residence, creating a dialogue of space types. The use of glass curtain-walls as a cladding material establishes a permeable boundary between the house and its immediate context, provides for light and views, and materially engages the glass skyscrapers visible on the immediate horizon. This combination—offset and cantilevered interior spaces viewable through a transparent exterior cladding—proposes a residential experience which is both spatially and visually suspended within the very close context.