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In 1991, David Wallance began working on a spec house that he wanted to build in Croton-on-Hudson, a village about 30 miles north of New York City along the Hudson River. At the time, he was living in Brooklyn, and was working with Polshek Partnership in Manhattan, where he still works as a senior associate. He worked on the house for several years. Then, in 1995, Wallance and his family moved in.

"I began to realize that this wouldn’t be a truly profitable spec house," Wallance said. "It was too nice."

Even before he decided to move his family into the house, Wallance started adding personal touches to the design.

"Programmatically, it was very generic," he said. "It boiled down to a center-stair Colonial. But even though it started out as a spec-build, I began to incorporate a lot of memories and references to other architecture."

Wallance mentioned Corbusier’s Villa Stein as a specific design inspiration, since that house and his share an almost cubic vertical arrangement and a prominent piano nobile in their designs. Wallance challenged himself to articulate the blank, vertical facades of the house.

"I saw it almost as an academic exercise, as a case study," he said.

But the shape of the house was not chosen on a whim. Zoning regulations in the village required the house to have two complete septic fields, leaving a small area on which the house could sit.

"The siting was very tight," Wallance said. "That dictated a vertical organization to the house. The stair became very important, so I created it as a sort of winding sculptural form that stitches the house together."

He also noted that he designed the stair with a shallow tread-to-riser ratio, so that they would be easy to climb over and over again in the course of a day.

When Wallance and his family moved into the house, it was only partially finished. Working as his own general contractor, he finished the house over the next five years, completing unfinished plywood interiors and refining structural elements, such as a bracing system for the roof. And then, in 2001, he sold the finished house.

He did not, however, sell the house because he was unhappy with it. In fact, his eight-year-old daughter protested the move, because she wanted to keep her room. Moving out just completed the original plan to sell the house.

And in fact, Wallance is working on designing another house, this one specifically for him and his family. And he has learned from the experience of being both speculative architect and the resident of his own spec house.

"I designed a house with 3000 square feet of livable space," he said. "But for five years, we were living in about 1900 square feet of space. That really affected our thoughts on the second house. Instead of 3000 square feet, we’re going to build 2000."

He also realized the tension between what makes for great architecture and what makes for a comfortable place to live (which is not to say that he and his family were uncomfortable in the house at all).

"If you find a place to put all the stuff, it makes the open spaces seem that much cleaner," Wallance said. "It’s a dichotomy. I don’t think I could live like a minimalist, but I don’t think there’s a better way to create an architectural experience."

Kevin Lerner

Gross square footage:
3,900 sq. ft.

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