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The house is at the far end of the property, reached by a gravel road about 1,400 ft long. The road was built first. The road crosses a wetland on a culvert; the culvert design was revised during construction. Ledge along the route was broken with explosives.

A 6 in. ductile-iron water line runs under the road and ends at a fire hydrant beside the house. Wastewater goes to an on-site septic system.

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The foundation is a frost-protected shallow foundation: a slab on grade with no frost wall. Instead of a wall carried below the frost line, the foundation is insulated horizontally: insulation runs under the slab and about 4 ft out past its edge. The foam forms stay in place after the pour and serve as edge insulation.

The structural slab is the finished floor on the first level. It was laid out to within 1/4 in. corner to corner over a length of a little more than 100 ft, and polished to a salt-and-pepper exposure. The slab is recessed under each lift-slide unit so the threshold is flush. There is no radiant heat in the slab.

Watch · 5:27Frost Protected Slab ExplainedNS Builders

Cape Cod Panel pre-cut and panelized the wood frame off site, and the panels were erected on the slab. The building is a single gable a little over 100 ft long. An open breezeway passes through it, and the second floor bridges over the breezeway. Exterior walls are 2x10 studs at 16 in. on center.

Rockwool ComfortBoard runs continuously over the sheathing on the walls and the roof. Two layers of ComfortBatt fill the stud cavity. Pro Clima Intello Plus is on the inside of the frame with taped seams, and Pro Clima Adhero 3000 is adhered to the outside of the sheathing.

Pressure-treated strapping at 16 in. holds the shingles off the insulation. The cavity behind the shingles is open at the base of the wall and at the ridge, so air moves through it.

Watch · 13:56Why Exterior Insulation Is The Key To Your Home’s FutureNS Builders

Of Possible and NS Builders call the cladding the megashingle: an oversized shingle, each one half of a 4x8 sheet of Roseburg marine-grade plywood. Vincent Appel on the size: “the mega shingle, which is just a four by eight sheet of plywood cut in half, creates this oversized version of a familiar shingle.” The same megashingle covers the walls and the roof. Every shingle is coated on all six sides with a pine tar mix from Sage Restoration.

Vincent Appel on the orientation of the panels: “We didn’t want end grain facing the sky.” NS Builders cut and squared every panel before hanging it and re-coated the cut edges with pine tar. The joints are 1/8 in., held along walls about 100 ft long.

Watch · 19:18One Shingle to Rule Them All!NS Builders

The first floor has Andersen lift-slide units, 9 ft tall, running from floor to ceiling. They are used as large operable windows, and the screens are fixed. An operable screen would need a third track and a deeper unit.

The exterior aluminum is sandblasted and then clear anodized. The interior is Douglas fir with a clear coat. Each unit sits in a recess in the slab, so the floor meets the glass with no step. The roof has Velux roof windows and a Velux skylight.

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Walls and ceilings are veneer plaster over blueboard, painted matte. There is no baseboard; the wall stops at a 3/8 in. reveal above the floor. Doors are ceiling height with no head casing, and their frames are plastered in. Pocket-door tracks are buried in the ceiling. A circular opening on the second floor looks down into the living room.

Millwork is white oak, made by Materia Millwork. Counters and backsplash are Danby marble, quarried in Vermont and fabricated by Boston Counters. The first floor is the polished concrete slab, and the second floor is wood.

The entry steps are reclaimed granite. Vincent Appel selected the stones at the yard. The stone faces show feather-and-wedge marks from splitting.

The closets in the primary bedroom and along the upstairs hall have no doors and no built-in joinery. Curtains on ceiling tracks close them, in the same cloth as the window curtains.

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Most of the furniture was sourced through Of Possible. Vincent Appel’s plan places darker furniture in the dining and living room, at the middle of the floor plan, and lighter oak at each end: the kitchen millwork and the bedroom furniture.

The Tre Sekel dining table and the Earl Home bed are by different makers. Both are white oak with the same dutchman joint inlaid in blackened aluminum.

The coffee table is reclaimed teak. The wood is burned and sanded three times and then sealed, which produces a matte charcoal surface.

The main house has a ducted energy recovery ventilator (ERV), which exchanges heat and moisture between outgoing and incoming air. The studio has no ductwork. It uses Lunos in-wall heat recovery units, which work in pairs. Electrical service runs through Span smart panels. The roof penetrations are aligned in a row.

Watch · 17:24The Hidden Craftsmanship on This Epic HouseNS Builders

The disturbed ground was seeded with four custom native mixes from Ernst Conservation Seeds, one for each condition: the road edge, the steep slopes, the sunny east meadow and the shaded wet ground. Land Design Associates did the installation.

The upland mixes include sideoats grama, bottlebrush grass and purple lovegrass, with milkweeds, coneflowers, oxeye sunflower and three asters. The wet mix includes lurid, blunt broom and fox sedge, soft rush, fowl mannagrass and northern bulrush, with golden alexanders. Several of the species are Pennsylvania and Rhode Island ecotypes. “PLS” means pure live seed: the rate counts only seed that will germinate.