Budget Breakdown: The Foundation Is Also the Floor at This Shedlike $1.1M Hudson Valley Retreat

A New York City couple had been going up to the Hudson Valley for several years when they finally decided to build a weekend retreat there. The prospect of maintaining a piece of land in the country had always deterred them—having to plow snow or perform other upkeep in the face of bad weather. On one trip up, however, they looked at a four-and-a-half acre site in Claverack, a few miles outside the city of Hudson, and envisioned themselves growing a garden and pursuing other hobbies they couldn’t back in New York. The parcel also had nice views of the valley with the Catskills in the distance.

After buying the land, the couple hired Maria Ibañez de Sendadiano and Todd Rouhe of IDSR Architecture to design home. They liked that the firm focused on energy-efficient design, which it’s been experimenting with for more than a decade now; Ibañez de Sendadiano and Rouhe, a couple themselves, created a small weekend house for their own family in Mount Tremper in 2009.

In Claverack, the architects created Orchard House, a shedlike 1,850-square-foot retreat that fits in easily with the Hudson Valley’s barn vernacular, with corrugated sheet metal cladding and a concrete foundation. The foundation, embedded with pipes for heating and cooling, has a polished surface to double as the house’s mottled gray floor. The single-level plan is divided by a hall that becomes a breezeway when the front and back doors are open; to one side are the living spaces and the primary bed and bath, and on the other is a guest room with a bath of its own.