D'Arcy Jones's innovative approach to suburban residential design

Architecture

House: The Jones house

The Jones house certainly questions the familiar. It is an unadorned two story gray block of a building with no visible windows or apertures. It is a single-family dwelling that offers a contrast between the greenery surrounding it and the conventional suburban cottages.

It appears robust and heavy on the one hand, and yet, possibly light and minimal on the other with its contrast of the slender wood pillars that cut into it and serve for entrances.

As Dubbledam and Sheppard (2009) remark it "is carefully composed around the inventive use of common materials." Solid gray brick manifest its matter, and the entire is constructed in three rectangular square and solid blocks that complement each other, with barely visible panes for windows that appear on a withdrawn side of the building. Altogether, it is a well-proportioned block of a building.

Whether the building is optimistic depends on the opinion of the perceiver but it certainly is contextually logical, astute and critical in that it is replete with philosophical connotations in a post modernistic manner and seems to present a stable and solid presence in a suburban context.

In a manner of speaking, the house does seem to evade the reality of suburbia by importing some of the atmosphere of an urban environment and by obscuring the inhabitants from the reality around them. In this manner, they oppose the monster homes and McMansions of contemporary living by retreating to a simpler, more unvarnished style stark naked in a manner of speaking of any of the pretensions of contemporary suburban sprawl and villas.

D'Arcy Jones has won awards for his innovative ideas about dwellings cohering to their landscape. It is difficult to imagine the Jones house fitting into its landscape. Rather, its stands out like a sore thumb, but, on the other hand, when one considers that suburbia is supposed to constitute fresh, unrestrained tracts of nature, D'Arcy probably succeeds in capturing that atmosphere with his architecture more than any of the typical suburban homes do.

Dubbledam and Sheppard (2009) remark that DJD strives for "beauty, generosity, and ambition" and endeavor to replicate this via a "continuous conversation between form and site, space and climate, user and enclosure."

D'Arcy has been said to overcome cliches with a strong vision. Jeremy Sturgess remarked that his "projects are singularly appropriate to their sites without becoming nostalgic or pretentious.'" (Weder, 2008). The Jones house is certainly not pretentious or nostalgic, and its very simplicity makes it cohere to its rustic surrounding in an innovative way that, compared to the contrast of the overly sentimentalized homes around it, is bound to shock at first sight.

D'Arcy's architecture is promoted as characterizing "Timeless form, substantial materials and a modern sensibility" All of these can be evidenced in the Jone's house that likely does not take up more space than the standard suburban dwelling but, constructed of solid and uncluttered material seems to do so and to be spatially preoccupied with its surroundings.

Renovation

The Cowboy cabin

Set squarely in the woods, the Cowboy cabin is a flat-pack cabin, one-story, well proportioned as all of D'Arcy creations are, and resonating with its landscape and surroundings by the use of scrubbed, unadorned wood.

D'Arcy shocks again by shifting the entrance door from its familiar place, and by transforming a tectonic structure into something that is 'light and minimal' and blends into its surroundings.

Totally scorning conspicuousness, the unadorned structure merges light and air (in its breadth of light material to portray a modernistic dwelling that focuses on simplicity and primal value and by doing so it becomes one with the wood around it, humbly fitting in and becoming part of its context.

Portraying a minimalist style, the cabin has no windows only two floor to ceiling gaps in its surface front for doors. The sides are constructed of darker wood, the front from lighter wood, and it stretches back into its surroundings, robust and confidant, homely and inviting blending its formation into its environment.

With its simplicity of structure and meticulous emphasis on detail, it is no surprise that the 'Cowboy' cabin won the prestigious Award of Merit in the 2009 Canadian Architect Annual Awards of Excellence.

It is authentic in its return to nature and in stripping away the veneer of contemporary pretentiousness to the essence of life: freshness, earthiness, genuineness, and an illumination that enables it to merge 'form and site, space and climate' together in one beautiful whole. The end result is a perfect consummation with nature where the whole, begun with the familiar is subtly transformed into something new.

D'Arcy's constructions, generally, have flat roofs, deep overhangs, and, oftentimes, large spaces for windows or doors. They are deceptively simple. The Jone's house, for instance, would easily run from $65,000 to $100,000 and that's just for the shell of the house (Levy, 2010). The simplicity of the construction belies its costliness.

His buildings are cutting-edge, certainly not tacky, and present a fresh minimalist look that whilst linking to the familiar transforms into something new. Each and every creation carefully takes the environment into consideration and like the artist that he is, D'Arcy seeks to penetrate into the essence of the environment and recreate that transparency, nature, and light by way of his material and form. In the Jones case, the house seemed to deny the reality of its location, but in the case of the cabin and the McLellan-Saddy renovation, D'Arcy's constructions fit in splendidly communing, as it were, through the slope of the structure, the generosity of the form, the color and high-quality of the material, and most of all, through the minimalistic design, with the breadth of space around it.

Emphasizing design over space, D'Arcy fights against the trend of proliferating monster homes and Mcmansions. 'Good things are small' says Weder, and D'Arcy targets wealthy clients who wish to live in smaller homes.

Rather than the 5,000 plus square feet for a 3-member family, (with the countless empty rooms to spare), D'Arcy has chosen to keep it compact and ecological with a profusion of openness so that the house actually ends up feeling more expansive than the standard contemporary dwelling.

Instead of behemoth and space-wasting matter, D'Arcy Jones focuses on maxing out the quality and innate form of homes so that, with his timeless forms and substantial material D'Arcy transcends time and returns people to nature.