PACHANO&VOLLERT

interiors
architecture
urbanism


We are a full service architecture and interior design office based in New York, Western Massachusetts and working the Hudson Valley, Berkshires and beyond. We aim to elevate the quality of people’s lives through architecture by creating spaces that inspire discovery. Our approach is simultaneously exploratory, technical, and responsive to requirements of the project and sites on which we build. Our process intuitively reveals possibilities latent within every brief over a range of project types and scales including urbanism, buildings, houses, renovations, additions, interior design and furniture. Regardless of scale, we are committed to be curiously engaged and thorough from beginning to end.

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FOREST LAKE HOUSE
Lee, Massachusetts

The Berkshires Mountains of Western Massachusetts are surrounded by forests and spotted with lakes and ponds. We were offered the challenge of designing a house for a for a couple with an extended family, with the need for spaces to be used privately and in communion with family and friends. Our strategy for working on this small site was to upset the existing foliage as little as possible and use it to inform the shape of the building. We worked to preserve an existing maple tree in the center of the rear yard and used it as a “pivot” point for the design.

We separated the program into two “zones,” residential and public. Were the two sides meet, the building pivots a minimum in order to maximize the rear yard’s Southern exposure. Passive House detailing was employed to create a super insulated, air tight building resulting in interiors that maintain a constant temperature and humidity level while minimizing energy use. 

Interior spaces hold views of the lake and forest while providing comfort and functionality.  Windows provide frames of discovery and create pauses through space, pulling you in and away, creating tension between intimacy and distance, inside and outside, silence and sound. The light shimmers off the lake into the interiors which are activated by trees which give shape to the sound of the wind.