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Bates Masi + Architects LLC, a full-service architectural firm with roots in New York City and the East End of Long Island for over 45 years, responds to each project with extensive research in related architectural fields, material, craft and environment for unique solutions as varied as the individuals or groups for whom they are designed. The focus is neither the size nor the type of project but the opportunity to enrich lives and enhance the environment. The attention to all elements of design has been a constant in the firm’s philosophy. Projects include urban and suburban residences, schools, offices, hotels, restaurants, retail and furniture in the United States, Central America and the Caribbean. The firm has received 43 design awards since 2003 and has been featured in national and international publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, Architectural Digest, Architectural Record, Metropolitan Home, and Dwell. Residential Architect Magazine selected Bates Masi one of their 50 Architect’s We Love. A gallery exhibition in May 2010 featured the firm’s earlier work from 1960-70.

 

Paul Masi spent childhood summers in Montauk and currently resides in Amagansett. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from Catholic University and a Masters of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He worked at Richard Meier & Partners before joining this firm in 1998.

Harry Bates, a resident of East Hampton, received a Bachelor of Architecture from North Carolina State University. After ten years with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he was in private practice in New York City for 17 years before moving the firm to Southampton on the East End in 1980. Our offices are currently located in Sag Harbor with plans to relocate to a new LEED Certified office building of our own design in East Hampton.

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Silver Hollow

Lot size: 159 acres

Building size: 2,100 sq. ft.

Location: Chichester, NY

Program: Single Family Residence

The problems of accessing an isolated 160 acres in New York’s Catskill Park necessitated materials and building techniques that ultimately set the design platform for a young Manhattan couple’s weekend retreat. The required access road traverses a stream on a new timber bridge protected from seasonal flooding by locally quarried riprap embankments. Beyond, the road cuts into a thickly forested hemlock-covered north-facing mountainside, opening a narrow corridor to distant views and ushering light into the woods’ shadows.

Set on a plateau of dense woodland above Silver Hollow and cradled by mountains to the east, south and west, the building site’s want for daylight and vistas is reconciled by reiterating the road-building process. An aperture opens to sunset views in the west and ambient sky light above by cutting a narrow swath through the trees just wide enough for the foundations’ excavation and far enough down slope to clear the tree canopy. The house interfaces this aperture through expansive glass sliding doors at each end, and by siphoning sky light from the roof deck to the ground level. In conventional structures “solar tubes” carry sky light through rooftop acrylic diffusers and reflect it through specular aluminum ducts to the lower stories. In Silver Hollow, the entire house becomes a “solar tube”.

By employing a system of deep timber beams spaced six feet apart, the floor framing no longer depends directly on the exterior walls for support. The solid floor and ceiling may be held-back at the edges to open an uninterrupted cavity from the first floor through the roof. This cavity is lined with white reflective metal road sign blanks and made translucent to the sky and interior spaces through a diffusive plane of clear corrugated polycarbonate. Light reflects off the roof deck’s metal planking, through the polycarbonate plane into the light cavity, off the road sign blanks, and into the house’s interior spaces.

Traditionally development in Catskill Park has taken place adjacent to waterways and existing transportation corridors. Since this project sits inside a relatively undisturbed tract, special environmental care is taken. Moss-coated boulders strewn across the hillside are piled like riprap against the graded slopes to either side of the parking area to protect against erosion; hemlocks cleared for the road and building site are recycled into siding at a local mill; and the light cavities double for natural convective cooling in the summertime: cool air draws below, warms by solar radiation, rises to the top, and exhausts through manually-regulated louvers. Along with the “solar tube” daylighting, these systems unite harmoniously with the natural setting to satisfy the owners’ aspirations for “simplicity, functionality, warmth, and soul”.

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