Michael and Roger looked at land for six months before they found the cornfield. What stopped them was not the acreage or the soil. It was the walk to the top of the hill, where the ground fell away to the south and east and the whole valley opened up: folded hills, wetlands at the bottom of the slope, classic Wisconsin farmsteads and red barns scattered to the horizon. They bought the property in the Town of Scott knowing they wanted to build, and knowing almost nothing else about the house, except that whatever went there could not compete with that view. It had to belong to it.
That instinct, that the house should step back and let the place come forward, turned out to be the whole design.
When project designer John Annis first came to the site with them, he did what the studio tries to do before drawing anything, which is to sit with the land and let it set the terms. The easy move on a hill like this is to put the house on top, where it becomes the cake topping, the first thing anyone notices. Instead, it was set a little below the ridge, low enough that the grade could come up around it and settle it into the slope. From the road it reads as though it had always been there. Set that low, the house gives up being the thing you look at and becomes the thing you look from.
Almost everything else followed from the view and the sun. The main living room, the primary bedroom, and a small room a half story above the second floor were each turned toward the valley, but each is set slightly off from the others, so no two give quite the same picture. Late in the design, after some invasive trees at the bottom of the hill came out and the vista grew more expansive, the whole house was rotated a few degrees to catch the corrected view. Small adjustments like that are the difference between a plan pulled off a shelf and a house shaped to one particular piece of ground. A stock plan cannot know where the good light falls, or which way to lean a kitchen so that an ordinary corner of the yard, once it is planted, becomes a small garden worth looking at.
The house works with the sun as much as with the scenery, and it does most of that work without asking to be noticed. The first floor is polished, poured concrete, and in winter the low southern light reaches all the way to the back wall; the owners measured a three to four degree gain from the sun alone. Radiant tubing runs beneath the slab, so on a January morning the floor itself is warm underfoot. In summer, when the sun rides higher, the roof overhangs were sized to the solstice angles so those same windows fall into shade. There is almost always a breeze on the hill, and casement windows throughout the house open to catch it; across the first two months of last summer the couple ran the air conditioning only once, when a heat wave forced it. Behind the house, a solar field sits inside a berm that doubles as a windbreak and quiets the highway to the north. The owners are careful about how they describe it. Not off the grid, they say, but substantially independent.
None of this is the point of the house, though. It is what lets the point happen.
Michael showed sheep in 4-H as a kid and went on to become a veterinarian, and he always said that when he retired he would keep a sheep farm and do it the right way. Now he does. Norwal is a small working farm of sheep and goats, and Roger works from home, his office looking straight out at the animals as they rotate through the paddocks. Running a farm is a seven-day job, but as Roger puts it, it is also a good break from a screen.
They built for the long term in a more literal way, too. An elevator, grab bars, and wider doorways were part of the plan from the beginning, in anticipation of their own aging and of family members with mobility needs. What they wanted, they say, was for no one who visits to be left out; anyone can reach the top floor and what is arguably the best seat in the house. That top room, a half story up and set on the corner, they call the B&B Room, for Books and Booze. On a clear cold day you can see the steam from the power plant in Port Washington, twenty miles off. One Christmas they sat and watched fog rise from the east end of the valley, cross it, climb the hill, and wrap around the house. Last Fourth of July, from that same room, they watched fireworks go off in every small town on the horizon at once. Last fall, when the asters bloomed, a couple hundred migrating butterflies converged on the place.
When John came back after the house had been lived in a while, what struck him was not the view he had worked to frame. It was the way the levels talk to one another, so that even from the back of the kitchen you can see down the slope out front and up to the room above, sheltered and yet never cut off from the distance. He calls it prospect and refuge, the old pairing that goes back to the earliest shelters people made.
Michael is at the farm every day, and he says it never feels like work when you love what you are doing. He and Roger were married here, once the barn was up, and they built to stay. The local zoning allows only one house on these fifty acres, so the land can never be carved up around them and the view they fell for is theirs to keep. Two years in, there is nothing they would change. On a summer night you will find them out by the stone wall, the house quiet behind them, watching the June moon rise, or the fireflies come up in the pasture, exactly where they meant to end up.
