Carol and Fred Smith's home is located near New York, Connecticut, on the ocean coast near the city of Darien. Last year marks 50 years since the completion of construction, and Richard Mayer considers this particular project a key stimulus for his future career. In addition, it was the Smith house that helped shape Mayer's architectural language and philosophy.
As the architect recalls, at the time of receiving the order, in 1965, his workshop was located in one of the two rooms of his apartment; shortly before that he left the office of Marcel Breuer to work on his own. Carol Smith, who hired him, needed a young architect to devote all his attention to the design of her home. As a starting point, she and her husband, Fred, showed Mayer a design for a spacious, one-story "ranch-style" structure that had been made for the previous owner of the land, but the architect immediately realized that this configuration of the building was extremely disadvantageous. To construct its foundation, it would have been necessary to blow up a lot of rock that makes up the site: in such conditions, a house with a small building spot was needed, and Mayer turned to a vertical composition. As a result, the Smith house has three floors with a total area of 465.5 m2. Wood was used as the main material.
From the side of the entrance, a plot of 3251 m2 is densely covered with conifers; the house is turned there by a wall with a small number of windows - living rooms are grouped there. From the rear façade, open to the water surface, are collected common spaces for family and guests. The glass wall here seems to be sandwiched between the steel columns of the frame and the brick volume of the fireplace with a chimney, which creates an elusive tension conceived by Richard Mayer. Natural and man-made here exist separately from each other, but it is difficult to separate them: the ocean, sky, lighting determine the perception of the interior.
According to Richard Mayer, in the Smiths' home, as in all of his other residential buildings, he strove for clarity and elementary geometric form. His projects in this genre are always closely related to the human scale and the desire to make the architectural whole clear, reasonable, lyrical and real.
The house is now owned by the original owner's son, Chuck Smith. He was five years old when the building was completed - it amazed him, and Smith admits that he feels that childish surprise every time he walks inside.
