On the path down the hill from our parking lot to our camp on the lake’s edge seemed the best place for Lynn’s, my wife’s, studio and my own. Hers would be for the creation of jewelry and crafted art pieces, mine for writing and work with the piano. The two are on opposite sides of the path, angling away in opposite directions from it, and suggesting alternative and contrasting domains.
Lynn’s you enter through a door looking toward the lake. Once inside, on axis is a long vertical window permitting only a hint of the lake through the trees with which it is in dialog. But your movement takes you left under the rising roof to a new perpendicular relationship with a differently angled lakeside façade. Through large windows it reveals the sky and floods the working countertops with light. Turning back still further to the left there is an alcove not aligned with the light giving windows but instead with the entrance door to the studio. It offers a stable place of repose with its own smaller source of light toward the lake and sky. The alcove with its couch and shelf above does not permit standing. From there there is only the rising ceiling and a smaller window to the left to gaze at the sky. Re-entering the main work area and sitting to go to work, the lower window in the lakeside façade offers a view of the downward sloping floor of the forest and its details as it makes it way toward the lake. When you leave the studio the light washes the walls and the underside of the roof toward the relatively darker zone of the entrance through which you transition back out into the filtered light of the woods.
My studio you enter on the way up the path, away from the house, a slight move to the left to up the steps to enter. The roof and walls that reached out to invite you now constrict you from above and from the sides. You are in a darker place, an alcove with windows to the left, and where the only movement possible is to the left, returning toward the place from which you came. That wall of the alcove is not aligned with the path of entrance. Instead it expands out toward the lake and the roof above rises with it. By now you have turned 180° from entering through the door to entering the space of the studio. While the walls and ceiling open to the lake, part of the ceiling drops down in a gesture of closure and the windows emphasize verticality. On the side walls vertical slots of windows create a slight wash of light on the front wall thus detaching it somewhat from its enclosing role. The four surfaces defining the space are not parallel, all opening in the direction of the lake. Constraining the psychological movement in that direction are how the light is made, where the windows are placed, and how they are shaped. The result is to create a place to which you have arrived, in gentle tension with the continuity of movement and light.
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