PALMEDO RESIDENCE

Though you may not realize it instantly, given the tabletop-flat terrain, the Palmedo house on Long Island, New York, works extremely closely with its landscape. The visitor's approach is straight on, with the squared-off forecourt providing a meticulously ordered base for a perfectly symmetrical house. House and setting resonate with each other. What later bowls the visitor over is that Jacobsen has devised a sequence of movement and views that links people to the landscape at every turn.

The gabled entry portion exists principally to bring you inside and then send you through a glass-walled outdoor passage—reinforcing the primacy of the setting—before you reach the main body of the house.
Once you're fully inside, you find the walls and the generous windows arranged to bring the outdoors in. Dissolving the barriers between inside and out has long been a goal of modern architects. In the living room, a corner of butt-jointed glass running all the way down to the floor makes the walls practically melt away. The landscape—first the manmade portion, where the corner of a patio echoes the corner of the room, and then the larger natural portion, where a view of Long Island Sound is framed by trees—shows itself to be the star of the show. By not giving away the full view at the start, by withholding parts of it, adding dynamic twists, placing some windows where they capture only sky, and then letting certain views explode outward, this home intensifies the feeling of involvement in the landscape.