First glimpsed from town, the house resembles an outcropping of white marble emerging from the hillside. After a winter snowfall, it is all but invisible. Slipped between two squat, Alpine-style buildings along a narrow drive, the structure occupies a steep site scarcely more than 40 feet wide, the former side yard of the house next door. After subtracting setbacks required by the local building code—12 feet on either side—the resulting mass is a narrow tower rising from the street, half of its bulk buried, like an iceberg, within the hillside. “How can an underground house enable the penetration of daylight and views that are crucial for living?” Koolhaas said, neatly summarizing the project’s fundamental contradiction. “It meant that the section of the house was critical.” Above ground, the house’s white concrete, infused with pulverized Carrera marble, has a lustrous finish that looks and feels like fine porcelain.
The bottom of the house sits at street level, where a discreet entryway presents all the heft and charm of a bunker’s blast door. Turning a key prompts the large metal slab to silently pivot inward, revealing three-and-a-half flights of stairs rising straight ahead. To the left, a room lined in warm okoume wood offers a place to store ski boots and jackets. Here, street shoes are traded for felt slippers to protect the home’s immaculate, glacier-white resin floors. Back in the hall the stairs rise in parallel to—never touching—a luminous wall covered in what resembles insulation foil. The aluminum paper wall covering calls to mind Andy Warhol’s legendary, foil wrapped Factory. Far ahead, at the stairwell’s summit, sunlight leaks through the underside of a cast-resin bath basin perched above the steps.
