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CommentsThe Line House
Gregory Holman
(page 1 of 2)
A line is all you need. Not a squiggly one. Ultimately, that's it. Practically speaking, you need some other things: A nice big woodsy lot on a hillside southeast of Springfield, in cul-de-sac-land. Plenty of financial muscle (orthopedic surgery can be a very good living). More importantly, you need a 25-year-old son who's an architect. One trained at KU in Lawrence, Kansas. And Columbia University in New York. One who snagged one of the most prestigious fellowships in the field-the first KU graduate ever to do so. One who counts Asian art and Mies Van Der Rohe among his influences. One who worked for Bernard Tschumi and Stanley Tigerman in New York. One who knows what he's doing. Or hoped he knew what he was doing. Or at least was willing to give it a shot. Could you design an 8,000-square-foot house for your parents? Springfield native Matthew Edwin Hufft, now 29, found out that he could. And he did. And now his parents, Diane and Bob Hufft, live in the Line House, designed by hufft:projects, a New York architecture firm. And it is one of the most astonishing contemporary houses that exist anywhere in the United States, but most especially in TuscanFrenchcountryland Springfield.There are probably no more than 10 houses in metropolitan Springfield adorned with proper names. This is one of them, named the Line House because the house and its outbuildings are arranged along one unbending axis. That axis is called simply the Line.
Arriving at the Line House is not intimidating. For a building that's done in a style that mixes an Asian roofline with the concrete of more stark buildings, it is remarkably comfortable. The site has a lot to do with this. If the Line House were set at the top of a Table Rock Lake bluff, it might be more austere. It has dark textured-concrete walls and bands of glass. Used in different combinations or contexts (think professional-office strip on North Glenstone Avenue), these elements would be sprawl-style ugly. But the site is cradled by trees and downhill slopes.
The line is simple. It runs northwest to southeast. It starts with the Huffts' library, Dr. Bob Hufft's library. Matthew's drawing shows the line at its start, hooked into a letter L-L is for Library, but that's just a coincidence-that slides up, almost into a squared-off U-shape, before it quits and slices off southeast, in a ray that continues about halfway through the whole structure. Then it pokes out to the southwest, in the middle of the southwest wall of the main house. When translated from form into matter, the offshoot is made of concrete and Western cedar from the Bear Creek Lumber company in Washington state. Then the line resumes its southeast course toward another outbuilding: the shop. You guessed it: The shop is another lair for Bob. The main house, especially the great room with the kitchen, is a bit more about Diane.
Matthew met me when I came by last winter, waiting outdoors in the November chill, just to the left of that jutting southwest offshoot of the Line. He looks like someone who could be a Springfield native, owing to his all-American football-player features. Dressed in a white cable-knit sweater, he looks like someone who might plausibly work in so-chic-it-hurts SoHo, Borough of Manhattan, New York, New York, where he lives with his wife, Jessie. Matthew explains that the concrete-and-cedar screen divides the public "vehicle courtyard" (maybe what you're trained to call a parking lot after you go to architecture school) from the private drive and garage used by the Huffts.Next stop: Inside the house. The doors make a chanting noise when you enter, and the foyer is lovely, with a white-glass chandelier like an angular artichoke. As foyers for 8,000-square-foot houses go, it's built at a height for normal people, like much of the Line House. It's welcoming.
Matthew turns into a hallway just to the left of the foyer. "One of the things that was important to me was that you see art in front of you everywhere you look," he says, and he gestures to some Asian artifacts just inside. The curved, Eastern forms mark a contrast to all the angles and planes of the Line House. Diane is waiting in the great room. In the background, there is some kind of pan-African instrumental music playing. The room unites the living, dining and kitchen space, with a dramatic glass wall to the northeast. The dining room is cantilevered out toward the north, into space, so that the views are right up near the trees. The glass goes practically from floor to ceiling, so it's one of those outdoor-indoor spaces beloved by contemporary architects, with dining tables both inside and out, arranged in symmetry.
Diane observes that she thinks modern furniture should look sleek, but that she and Bob thought the height of their furniture in the great room was very important: It couldn't be too low. The 62-year-old wife and 66-year-old husband aren't gymnasts. She notes that the 3-D computer-animation software Matthew used to design the house allowed them to preview the exact sofas they were thinking of choosing. The result? Comfort for all. Diane recalls her husband's 90-year-old uncle who spent a recent holiday happily sitting in a B & B Italia chair, gazing out the windows.
The kitchen, Matthew continued, is one of the things visitors really talk about. It contains cabinets from Dornbracht, a design firm based in Iserlohn, Germany. The cabinets in most people's houses have long-edge hinges, opening on the right or left vertical side. Not so at the Hufft house. These are turned the other way round, with little garage-door-like coverings. They gleam with a silver-matte finish. And they're a perfect match for Diane's way of doing things in her kitchen (believe it, it's her kitchen): There's a compartment for everything. Everything is tidy. Nearby is a utility room with a computer, washer, dryer, cabinets, and skylights. It's white, pristine, almost empty. Easy to keep clean.
In fact, Diane confides, she does have a cleaning woman who comes regularly to help look after the house, but she cleans the kitchen herself, to her extremely exacting standards. "I'm a bit of a fanatic about that," she concedes. She's not kidding: Diane also has been known to bleach the pavers in the vehicle courtyard. Nearby, the coat closets in the living area of the great room match the Dornbracht cabinets almost exactly-the key difference being that the closets were made under the direction of Chuck Askings, of Enchanted Woodworks. In Rogersville.
Matthew goes into the hallway that leads northwest. It's the gallery hall-with a glass wall on one side and the concrete and split-block form of the Line making up the other side. Lined with art, the gallery hall has a fireplace visible at one end. If it's not art, it's something visual at all times. Visitors notice, along the Line, that paintings hang on the wall, but they seem to hang from nothing. There's a track hanging system that allows paintings to be supported without drilling holes. In this place, holes in the wall would be brutal, crude.
The first door off the gallery hall leads into the master suite. The door is in the same mahogany pattern as the front door of the house, and slides rather than hinges. Inside, there is some art, including an actual print signed by American artist Robert Rauchenberg-as good as anything in Andy Williams's modernist collections. That's one thing visitors notice, but then their eyes are glued to the wall behind the bed, done entirely in panels of leather.
