Ed Barnhart — Architect
“Emerging from architecture school there was a belief that things had to be visually bold and/or structurally heroic in order to have impact. Over time, I’ve come to learn the power that ‘small’ decisions and details can exert on inhabitants. I’ve learned the power of nuance.”
To that end, Barnhart insists on working directly with owners at every step of the design and construction process to ensure continuity of vision and completeness of details. Consequently, he is selective about the projects he undertakes, choosing to design only about one new house a year while supplementing that work with renovations and additions.
“The fact of the matter is, if you’re designing something to be highly valued by the initial owners as well as subsequent generations, it takes time. It’s one thing to design the basic structure of a home, but it’s another to tune it so that it really resonates.”
For Barnhart, this involves a desire to pare down to what’s important while finding what he calls ‘poetic openness.’ Often the houses he designs are modest in size, usually under 3,000 square feet, but engage a larger sense of place by using abundant and varied natural light and positioning windows and skylights to sculpt views of the sky, a surrounding forest, or nearby lighthouse. Spaces are designed to invite flexibility, serving perhaps one use early in family life but later enabling inhabitants to agein-place by living entirely on one floor.
“Rather than pursuing any singular metrics-based sustainability methodology for a given project, I will cherry-pick recommended practices from a variety of organizations invested in human wellness, ecological stewardship, and sustainable practices which resonate most strongly with the objectives of an owner and nature of the project. More than anything else, I seek for a project to maintain a long and potent multi-generational service life expectancy. That’s always an easy sell.”
— Excerpt from New View: A Curated Visual Gallery: Twenty Magnificent Homes by Northeast Architects
Photography by Bartholomew Studio
Photography by Bartholomew Studio
Photography by Bartholomew Studio