The Guesthouse

Located on an expansive property in rural western Massachusetts, this guesthouse project expands an eighteenth-century farmhouse with a barnlike contemporary addition and an array of casual outdoor living spaces and function-specific outbuildings.

NMA’s first phase of work entailed returning the farmhouse as closely as possible to original condition, restoring its wood plank floors, plaster walls and ceilings, moldings, and fireplaces, and selecting period-appropriate wallpaper and furnishings. New lighting and plumbing fixtures reflect the era in which those technologies became locally available. Befitting its rather formal plan and intimate scale, we devoted the original building primarily to a collection of private bedroom suites.

Gathering spaces—including kitchen, dining, bar, and lounge areas, entertainment rooms, an artist’s studio, and a two-story screen porch—are housed in the cedar-clad addition, whose form and materials echo the region’s historic hay and tobacco-drying barns. Generous doors and windows open its soaring timber-framed interior to the surrounding fields and gardens, while floors of local stone flow seamlessly from indoor to outdoor living spaces.

In every aspect of the project, NMA prioritized local, reclaimed, and sustainably sourced materials and the work of local tradespeople and artisans.

Photographer: Paul Teeling and Taggart Sorensen