Ideate Design Studio and Acorn Deck Housing Company craft a large hill-embedded home on the outskirts of Boston

Perched Prefab

Inserting a large 5,500 square-foot home into a particularly jagged hillside is no small task. For expert local prefabrication firm Acorn Deck House Company, the seemingly daunting undertaking required excavating and leveling a massive ledged rock. “It was all worth it,” Ideate Design Studio founder and principal Sashya Thind said. “The home has great views.”

The new 5,500 square-foot home sits high atop a hillside. (Tamara Flanagan)

Thind collaborated with Acorn Deck House Company Head of Design Michael Hawke to create a holistic project that gives architecture and interior design equal footing. Located in Wellesley, Massachusetts—a well-to-do suburb of Boston–the new home casts an impressive profile but doesn’t overbear its natural setting.

Indicative of the company’s prevalent style, the paired-back scheme ensures that the home seamlessly situates into its natural surroundings. Demonstrating the best of the company’s modular and panelized expertise, a two-tone wooden-clad facade helps elucidate the modernist structure’s many interlocking volumes. Inside, an exposed metal and wooden beam system plays host to a double-height, open-plan living and dining space but also helps segment-off the home’s more intimate six bedrooms and five bathrooms.

The home's intersecting volume scheme is indicative of Acorn Deck House Company's modernist style.

(Tamara Flanagan)

“The Acorn Deck House Company design is based on standard sizing of structural members,” Thind said. “This allows the interior to have grand openings, tall ceilings, and large expanses of windows to allow views and natural light in. The space benefits immensely from this technique. The large open spaces have great flow.

Iconic furnishings help evoke the home's modernist aesthetic.

(Tamara Flanagan)

Leading her own successful Boston-based interior architecture practice, Thind was responsible for outfitting this project with FF&E that could echo the architecture’s modernist simplicity. While a velvet serpentine vintage couch by Baker works to anchor the main living space, a Room & Board breakfast table and Carl Hansen wishbone chairs help delineate the dining room. A statement piece Mies Van Der Rohe and Lilly Reich Barcelona chair ties this great room together.

Wooden and metallic finishes carry over from the home's modular exposed beam structure.

(Tamara Flanagan)

“The integrity of the structure and materials is visible to the user and lets them connect with the space,” Think concluded. “For me, interior design has to be an extension of the architecture while creating a comfortable space for the client’s needs. The philosophy I follow in my practice is to create a warm and minimalist interior that allows the client to grow within it. The pieces I introduce have equal importance to form and functionality while being unique to the personalities of the clients.”