‘A couple who have long owned a spacious and comfortable weekend house on Long Island had wanted for some time to acquire more outdoor space for their home and extend the zone of quiet and peace around it.

They decided to build nothing but a small structure whose primary function would be to serve as a study for the wife, with space enough for books and an area for watching movies and listening to music.

‘We wanted the building to look as though it had always been there and that the landscaping not appear to be new,’ the wife explains. They invited architect Andrew Berman to invent a building that would be ideal for its purpose, one designed to have an only partially visible presence on the landscape. ‘My clients wanted a space for writing, reading and thought that would be a pleasant walk through the trees from the main house, but it was also to be very private, so not plainly in view,’ Berman explains.

Berman suggested to his clients that the building first present itself in the landscape as a symbolic door to the woods- a poetic idea they liked. The east façade, the building’s front, is, in fact, no more than a single three-foot-wide-by-12-foot-high wood-framed glass door. Angled out from it are the south and north façades. The resulting V-shape contains a double-height entrance hall and stair, the bath and the kitchen. The rear half of the structure, where Berman situated the study and entertainment areas, takes on a trapezoidal form. Much of its second floor is cantilevered, which not only minimizes the building’s intrusion on the landscape but also establishes a covered patio space on the ground level.’

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From the architect’s website:

‘This building was commissioned as a library and writing studio for a historian.
The site is adjusted to the client’s home, and is approached on foot through a stand of trees. There is no drive or path. The library sits at the threshold of an open field and a wood. A tidal stream is visible through the woods, at the rear of the site.
The building was conceived as a simple structure with a mutable presence in the landscape. It maps a path from the open filed, through a doorway at the edge of the woods, to a light filled space set in the tree canopy.
The interior is defined by douglas fir, books, and light. The exterior, clad in copper, shifts in apparent form and color depending of the light of the day, the viewing angle, and the seasons. The copper can appear reflective and bright, as well as mattle and dark. The velvety browns and violets will slowly give way to green.’