VJAA

Location: Bay City, WI

For many years, the client had searched for an ideal remote site, inspired by the quote that “the perfect place for a building is with a hill behind you, on a slope, looking south across a body of water”. The property she ultimately acquired was located on the steep Mississippi River Bluff overlooking Lake Pepin on the Wisconsin side, facing south. Lake Pepin is part of a dramatic glacial valley and lake formation in the Mississippi River between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The house was designed as her primary residence and a place where friends and extended family could gather. As an ethnographer, she also studied her own life patterns and how she ordered the field of objects, furnishings, and art that held personal meaning for her. These simple patterns of life helped to organize the site, interiors, and exterior composition of windows on the facade.

The client’s interest in how these designed objects contribute to well-being led us to study her objects to understand her, a process that she humorously referred to as “auto-ethnography”. Reference objects she introduced as part of our discussions were about happiness, relationships, and mental stimulation. Early on, she shared with us an idea for an immersive natural landscape and a cantilevered dance deck designed for Anna Halprin which projected social space into the landscape. Coupled with her own habits of arranging objects into a relational field, we began to see the site and main living space as projections out across a dramatic slope into Lake Pepin, with the dining table for eight at its center.