Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993 TAG: 9301190072
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SU CLAUSON-WICKER SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
ARCHITECTS BUILD HOUSE BY HAND
The way Cy Merkezas puts it, he and fellow architect and wife, Belinda Reeder, have been building a country house in their Washington, D.C., basement for several years.The Washington architect team has been creating attractive, insulated panels out of sheet-metal usually seen on roofs. These panels, though, are for the exterior walls of their woodland home.
These are the semiroutine tasks done on a winter's night in the city.
Much more effort - which they call play - has occurred in Floyd County in a hemlock-canopied forest near Alum Ridge. They discovered the site not long after graduation from Virginia Tech.
For 17 years, Reeder and Merkezas have been coming to the 50-acre tract for play and relaxation - no one said anything about rest.
They've been building a house by hand - hauling cinder blocks up a 45-degree incline, working with simple tools and materials they found in Floyd County. Using materials in strange ways, some might add.
Embodied in the building they've dubbed Villa Floyd are many ideas that fueled the couple's architecture practice.
This dwelling uses passive-solar design principles that moderate the extremes of climate.
The masonry walls and floor store warmth by day and release it by night, making the house one big solar collector.
The design evolved gradually - "organically and playfully," Reeder says, over many weekend vacations in Floyd. "We never did a drawing, never made long-range plans. We just thought about what we needed and added it. It's been such a luxury, designing a building this way," she says.
About 15 years ago, they decided it would be nice to give a little structure to the land - say, a retaining wall to lean against when they sat in the sun in their lawn chairs. After that came the outdoor table, and then - what the heck - an outdoor kitchen, complete with a homemade, stainless-steel sink fashioned by cementing a salad bowl into a concrete font.
"Then we decided to enclose the kitchen on three sides and put on a roof," Reeder said. "We just sort of designed it as we went. We added just what we needed - only and exactly what we needed. When you do all the labor yourself you tend to focus on the qualitative minimum - the least that you need to give the quality you want."
One of their architecturally nicest houses, in metropolitan Maryland, was featured in Better Homes & Gardens magazine and is known locally there as "the mansion," although it encompasses only 2,000 square feet.
"We've worked on houses 10 times that large," Reeder says. "But we've found that everyone has a little core where they do most of their living. This little house structures that core nicely."
Villa Floyd, now with a living room, loft and a kitchen that features a roll-away-stove and cabinets for extra entertainment space, is considered complete. The 600-square foot structure cost roughly $1,200 a year for 15 years - or $18,000.
Now they've hired local mason Richard Martin and several carpenters to help them build a three-story cinder block tower to house a bathroom, guest room and observation deck.
"Our concept of house isn't contained within four walls," Reeder says. "Many of the historic estates we've worked on have an outdoor kitchen and other dependencies.
Their firm, Archetype, specializes in restoration and renovation.
"Since we have lived so much outdoors on our Floyd property, we experience our living space as the buildings and everything in between. We envision a building complex with the tower, a studio, a shop and maybe a laundry all clustered around the main house."
One of their favorite activities has been visiting a Floyd farm supply or hardware store and pretending they don't know anything about the materials they see.
Using this game, they've fashioned both EPDM rubber and pressed corrugated asphalt into rather unconventional residential roofing.
Instead of trying to make drywall look like plaster, they've installed easy-to-clean, but obviously plastic, waterproof bathroom panels over their walls and ceilings, making the most of the material's geometric shape and exposing the screws.
Jalousie trailer-type windows in screaming red frames let light into all sides of the house, and sunlight-filtering Kalwall solar panel material throws a soft-white glow through the front west wall of the kitchen.
An open-weave rubber tennis-court mat covers the interior floor between cinder block and plastic panel walls.
The effect: modern and sleek.
Only in the past three years have the couple felt a strong need for electricity.
A generator pumps water from their well an average of 10 minutes a week. The water is heated in a solar collector on the roof. Supplementary heat comes from the fireplace; cooking is done over a gas camp stove. The bathroom was a latrine.
Lately, the generator has been running continuously as the carpenters use power drills and saws to build the tower.
"We've learned a lot about how things are built," Reeder says as she watches the men unload cinder blocks. "When you do the labor yourself, you think about the effort a construction takes."
"Yes, you don't design a 12-foot wall when 10 1/2 feet would do. Ten and a half feet mean 142 cinder blocks. That's a lot of trips up the hill," Merkezas says.