A Minimalist Fence Artfully Contrasts With a Renovated Farmhouse in the Hudson Valley

The picket fence isn’t for everyone. Take fashion designer Tia Cibani. Her recently renovated Hudson Valley farmhouse has a traditional shingled exterior, but when it came to a fence to protect her young children from a pool on one side of the property and a pond on the other, she went with a more contemporary enclosure. 

"It’s a nice, light, feathery move in the landscape because of its transparency," says Winka Dubbeldam, founder and principal of Archi-Tectonics, who designed the home’s renovation as well as the fence. Dubbeldam devised two arcing lines of parallel wooden rails set in steel brackets connected by a below-ground metal bar that is anchored in a concrete channel. Installed at meticulously consistent intervals, they have a striking regularity despite the absence of cross bracing, which would have meant a greater disruption to the landscape. The result is a minimalist artwork doing double duty as a practical partition.