Concord Residence Featured in New England Home

We are proud to share that the Concord Residence has been featured in the 20th Anniversary Issue of New England Home! Flip through the print version below and read on to learn more about the project, the unique site, and our collaboration process with the client, architect, builder, and contractor.

As designers working with the land, we love the opportunity to be involved from the beginning of a project, to sit at the table during those exciting conversations when a design vision for a project is born. At the Concord Residence we had just such an opportunity.

The clients had purchased a 2.4 acre lot, bounded on two sides by the densely forested Simon Willard Conservation Area. The previous owner had nearly clear cut the site, creating a stark contrast between open land and a wall of pines.

A large swath of the property partially graded and left fallow. The new owners aimed to build their forever home, surrounded by meadow and pollinator habitat, and engaged Neubauer Ennis Architects to help them. Before beginning the design, the clients selected Thoughtforms as the builder and R.P. Marzilli as landscape contractor. Marzilli recommended us to the client, based on our decades-long history of building elegant residential projects together.

During our first conversations with Kelly Ennis Connellan and Jill Neubauer we hit it off, recognizing a shared ethos of creating places that capture and amplify the inherent beauty of a site. We worked together through an iterative process to grade the land and site the house in a way that nestled it comfortably in its surroundings, blurring the woodland edge while maximizing privacy from the road and neighbor.

By sharing our design progress and meeting together frequently during the early stages, we were able to build off each other’s enthusiasm for the beauty of key landscape elements like an existing ledge outcropping and the vision of a home embedded in a wildflower meadow. This fluid back-and-forth continued through design documentation, material selection, and construction. We were in close contact with Thoughtforms and Marzilli during construction, which allowed us to establish the woodland planting along the conservation edge a full year before the balance of the planting occurred. Through close collaboration during site grading and planting we adjusted landforms, refined stormwater management, and set tree locations to respond to the subtleties of the site as it evolved.

The result is a project that weaves the landscape through the home. A woodland garden screens views to and from the road. A glassy foyer acts as a frame and threshold from the entry garden to the outdoor living room. An outdoor kitchen is the transition from kitchen to play lawn. A shade garden provides a focal point from home gym and offices. Forest, meadow, garden. . . home.