Mixing It Up

An extended family’s modernist, off-the-grid retreat



Architect Kyu Sung Woo fulfilled a decades-old promise to create a place for his family to live together when he completed a compound of three homes in Vermont last summer. It blends architectural traditions of New England and Korea.



By The Wall Street Journal

Kyu Sung Woo recalls frequent visits in his childhood from his grandmother, uncle and other relatives living next door. But during the Korean War, Woo and his family fled his hometown, now part of North Korea. His grandmother and uncle's family stayed behind, and were never heard from again.

Woo and his father vowed to buy another property where the remaining family could come together. Decades later, the promise was finally fulfilled: A modernist wood-and-metal compound designed for three generations of his family sits atop an 11-acre clearing in Vermont, amid birch, maple and pine trees. Inside, every room contains enormous windows and glass sliding doors, drawing the eye to the rumpled white blankets of snow-covered hills outside.
"We started a bit late, but I think we're enjoying the land now," says Woo, now 67, as he watches his toddler grandsons snatch icicles from a deck and scale 6-foot snowdrifts. An architect who splits his time between Seoul and Boston, Woo recently became the first in his profession to win South Korea's Ho-Am Prize, that country's highest honor.

Despite the 21-degree temperatures on a recent Saturday, the sun had warmed the kitchen-dining room to a steamy 87 degrees. Woo and his family retreated to a cooler spot in the 50-foot-long living room for a late lunch, sitting shoeless on floor cushions and munching on baked chicken, grilled asparagus and artichokes.

"So much of Korean life and culture is about shared spaces, taking off your shoes and having meals together," says Wonbo Woo, Kyu Sung Woo's 33-year-old son and a Manhattan-based producer for ABC News. "It's the core of what the family does in Putney."

Completed last summer for roughly $300 a square foot, Woo's structures -- two connected living areas and a shed -- bear steeply pitched roofs and roughly triangular shapes that hark back to New England barns. Yet they also draw inspiration from traditional family compounds in Korea, thousands of miles away. "He's got one foot in American and European modernism and one foot in Asia," says Stanford Anderson, an architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The buildings are "really brought together in a creative and imaginative way."
The home uses under-floor radiant heating, found throughout Korea. The framing of landscape views is partially inspired by Asian cultures, as are the large sliding doors that lead outside onto wooden decks, similar to sliding screen doors that lead to outdoor courtyards found in traditional Korean homes.

In an embrace of American traditions, Woo positioned the 3,200-square-foot compound atop the hill to avoid insects and to take advantage of long southern sun exposures. The buildings, just 15 feet wide at the widest point, have corrugated metal siding on the north-facing facades and stained cedar elsewhere. Off the grid, the retreat draws water from on-site wells and is powered by solar panels and a generator. The home is sparsely decorated with Swedish antiques and midcentury-modern pieces.

While many of Woo's commissioned homes are focused around central living rooms, his Putney compound is very different. "This is a very outward-looking house -- they want to be in nature," says architect Ozzie Nagler, Woo's longtime friend and mentor, who celebrated his 80th birthday in Putney. "But it works so well internally, too."

In the 1970s, Woo and his father, a painter, bought 20 acres in South Korea for their family, but they rarely visited and sold the land 10 years later. The idea remained dormant until 1999, when Woo's work designing dormitories for Bennington College brought him to Vermont. In 2003, he bought 250 acres of virgin forest near Putney, a rural town of 2,600.

What began as a single cabin with one child's bedroom quickly became two linked structures with two kids' rooms, inspired in part by Woo's daughter's becoming pregnant with her second son. The compound is designed so that more buildings can be added as the family grows. Woo's modernist compound is unusual for the area. In Brattleboro, 11 miles away, a 4,000-square-foot Cape Cod on a little over two acres is on the market for $799,000.

Woo designed something for everyone. For his wife, a concert pianist, he designed the living room, a long unadorned space with French acoustic fabric stretched across the ceiling, where she can practice and host small chamber concerts. Son Wonbo's bedroom faces south and west ("I tend not to be a morning person," he says). For his grandsons, he created balconies above the hallway, accessible from the top of their bunk beds and partially enclosed by Plexiglas, so they can spy (and drop small objects) on passers-by in the hallway.

Daughter Ilyon Park, a 36-year-old nonfiction writer in New York, describes the retreat as a "four-generation-and-beyond house, with the memory of my grandparents behind it." She adds, "It's a brand-new house with history, if that's possible." The house is still evolving; Woo pulled out fresh drawings detailing a new one-bedroom wing and roof deck the family is attaching to the living room.

In the fall, the family hosted a reunion for Woo's wife's clan. They are planning a second reunion for the Woo side this summer.

By Sara Lin, The Wall Street Journal