A rural retreat in upstate New York offers a restorative antidote to the site’s other inhabitant

on a woodland site in upstate New York, The Findling is made from locally-sourced larch and rests over a New England stone wall likely built in the late 18th century when the land was cleared for farming

Around 20,000 years ago, the state of New York was blanketed in an ice sheet that, at its thickest, measured two miles deep. As it melted, the glacier revealed a wild, new terrain, defined by landforms such as the Hudson River Valley, Long Island and Niagara Falls. But architect Vincent Appel, founder of Brooklyn-based studio Of Possible, was taken by humbler Ice Age relics: rocks – specifically, the fieldstone and glacially-deposited boulders that dotted the site of his most recent project in upstate New York.

Appel had been tapped by a Manhattan couple to design a small guesthouse, on their property in rural Columbia County, that could serve as a studio and host visiting family. The couple had built a weekend residence on the site about a decade ago – a glass-and-steel house that cantilevered boldly over a pond – but the experience had been a challenging one. The brief to Of Possible was to create a guesthouse that could be regenerative and healing. Appel says, ‘That begged the question, could it also be an alter ego to the original?’

During a walkthrough of the site, the architect discovered a historic stone wall, likely built by farmers in the late 18th century from the rocky glacial soil. ‘We thought, if the original house floats over the pond, maybe the guesthouse could float over that wall,’ says Appel. To do that, the architect devised a novel idea in the spirit of a fieldstone wall to perch the building atop large Ice Age-era boulders known in geology speak as glacial erratics.

The architect and his team further clarified their design, using the existing house as an aesthetic counterpoint. Unlike that building, the guesthouse would have a small, efficient footprint of just under 1,000 sq ft. Instead of steel and glass, it would be made from timber and rock, materials that deferred to the site. The interiors, meanwhile, were to remain minimal and warm, not unlike a hotel that the couple enjoyed visiting in Norway. ‘This was going to be a small house, but we still wanted it to feel capacious, warm and beautiful,’ they say.