Design firm: WORKac
Project name: Riverhouse
Location: Hopkinton, Rhode Island, United States
Dimensions: 297 square meters

Designed by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood for their own family, the house in the rural landscape of Rhode Island began as a refuge during the pandemic and has now become a permanent home, proposing a sustainable and collaborative living model that broadens the very concept of “family”. In the place of an obsolete building, which for years had served as an informal gathering place for cultural brainstorming sessions and socialising with friends and colleagues, the architectural duo designed a zero-emission passive building that retains the
informal and lively spirit of its origins. The compact, faceted volume, clad in local ash timber and topped by a sky-blue aluminium roof, opens up inside into a fluid sequence of spaces: varying ceiling heights, openings and vibrant textures combine to create a sense of radiant, cosy domesticity. The project extends to the process: friends and collaborators have contributed directly — sometimes camping on the site and fishing in the nearby river — to the definition of spaces and furnishings: from the living room table, to the theatrical curtains, to the
handcrafted Lebanese tiles. The result is a lived-in and “shared” home, for those who inhabit it or who “pass through” it, albeit only temporarily.