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Architects: Fuller/Overby Architecture
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Paul Warchol
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Structural Engineering: Silman, Joe DiPompeo, Nat Oppenheimer
Text description provided by the architects. The Teaneck farmhouse was built as a homestead of the Dutch Ackermans, early immigrants to 17th century New Amsterdam. Around the turn of the century the family resettled along the Hackensack River in New Jersey where farmland was more plentiful than on Manhattan Island. The simple one room structure was built in 1734, in the 1780's the family expanded the house using a barn typology. Locally quarried New Jersey sandstone was used throughout to construct the two foot thick walls - the same material (now exhausted) which forms the brownstone row houses of New York City. The farmhouse stayed within the family through the early 20th century and then passed through a variety of owners. In 2021 the house was offered for sale and remained on the market for more than a year due to diminishing internal reconfigurations, minimal interior natural light, and its status upon the National Register of Historic Places which complicated alterations (drawings and photographs of the house are held within the Archives of the Library of Congress). The clients, of Belgian and Milanese birth, found the property during an extensive search for their first home. They had moved to NYC to study and purse careers and the farmhouse, unique amongst typical American housing stock , had a familiarity to their childhood. The dignity of the structure simmered underneath an abundance of infill partitions, attempts at modern amenities, and misguided remedies to wear and tear.
The renovation to the upper floors stripped away an accumulation of partition walls and muddled finishes to reveal hand-hewn structural timbers and a gambrel roof resting upon the stacked stone walls. The second floor is now an open plan with varying scales of construction woven among the newly exposed wooden framework. New internal walls, perimeter millwork wrappers at the masonry edge, and finely scaled cabinetry unify the spaces and define particular programmatic pockets. These areas can be opened or closed with sliding and pivoting panels in accord with the desire of the moment. The spaces surround a central stair core that runs the full height of the house - a sectional suturing of the historic and modern. The double height hall, created with the partial removal of the third floor, receives the primary light of the day and greets the ascent to the second floor from the first (ground) floor. Small 18th century windows have been resized with angled apertures to offer generous natural light. The main bedroom, bath, and dressing room suite are an atmospheric sequence of chambers interconnected by oversized sliding doors. The bedroom, a continuation of the white millwork stair hall, opens into a soften bathing suite coated in tadelakt and field stone, which leads into a warm waxed wood dressing room. This circles back to the stairwell hall via a paneled doorway to complete the full ring of the plan.
A delicate steel staircase hangs amongst the timber structure within new lofty hall. The stair ascends to the uppermost level where a second bedroom/playroom is nestled within the folds of the roof. This cantilevered stair is a lightweight combination of perforated and expanded metal which hangs above an opening that penetrates the full height of the house. Light filters down to the less lit ground level, a floor fully ensconced by the two foot thick sandstone walls. The living room on this lower floor is within the original 1734 volume of the house. This space, efficient for the 18th century, was claustrophobically uncomfortable for modern use. A thin steel framed glazing system was cut into the rear facade to offer views of the river and western light from the setting sun. Double doors open onto a rolling landscape which has remained largely untouched throughout the past several centuries.
