Walls are basic building blocks of architecture and architectural form.  At a certain moment, every architect needs to confront the idea of ‘the wall’ – and decide how they see this basic construct philosophically.

Holley House: looking down the stone Farmer's Wall toward bedroom wing  Click here to view all photos of Holley House on hanrahanMeyers.com

close-up view: final approved sample wall construction

At Holley House, hMa spent close to six months having stone masons construct various walls, using different stones, all of which came either from the house site, or from a local quarry.  What we are showing on the blog today are a handful of the many variations that we produced in pursuit of the final wall details.

Questions arose:  how to make the wall:  with varying stone sizes (rejected – as this seemed to make the wall way too figural);  with regularly sized stones, with varying degrees of roughened edges (selected finish for final house design);  how thick to make the joint lines (we experimented with joint sizes from 1/2” to 1/8”.  We settled on 1/8”.);  how to detail the connection between the top of the wall (which was meant to read as an object in its own right) –  we wanted to install the wall with glass @ the top surface.  This approach was rejected by our client who did not want to make his ceiling height exceed 11’ in his living room areas. We settled on installing a deep ½” reglet at the top of the wall, separating the wall from the ceiling plane).

What we are presenting here is a catalogue of the various stones and stone configurations that hMa studied during that difficult period of critical design decision making.

This image (above) shows where the house design began, with the client and the architects admiring existing farmer’s walls on the site.  Part of the construction process included hiring local stone masons who excelled in rebuilding these walls.  The original walls were rebuilt and renovated as part of the overall design for the property. They also became the inspiration for the design for the house, which was organized around two 65-foot long walls built from stone local to the Garrison, New York area.

Stacks of the stone that the architects looked at to make the final stone wall samples.  The architects looked at a variety of widths and lengths of stones prior to making a final selection.  They also investigated the use of varying lengths of stones, as well as patterns that mixed varying thicknesses of stones.

the stone wall for the bedroom wing; in construction – Holley House by hMa

stone wall for the pool area; in construction – Holley House by hMa Click here to view all photos of Holley House on hanrahanMeyers.com