Vipp Pavilion is a minimalist guesthouse located in Lumberland, United States, designed by Johnston Marklee. Two tangent ellipses generate the plan, a geometry architects have mostly reserved for Baroque chapels and civic rotundas rather than a two-bedroom retreat on sixteen forested acres in Sullivan County. Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee take the figure from the pond the building sits on, so the plan reads as an echo of the water rather than an imposition on it.
You enter a curved open-air courtyard of smooth sand-colored stucco, where the wall’s continuous sweep catches raking light and produces arcs of shadow that shift through the day. The curve pulls the eye upward and crops the sky into an oval. From across the meadow the volume reads as a stone dropped at the water’s edge, solid and scaleless, and only surrenders its volumetric form as you close the distance.
Passage into the interior happens at the tangent point where the two ellipses meet, a threshold with no door-sized ceremony attached to it. The second ellipse opens as a single skylit room with concrete floors and rough stucco walls turned outward toward the pond and meadow. Three skylights cut through the roof depth and track light across those walls, where the ribbing registers every degree of solar movement. Two bedrooms sit tucked into the residual space between the curved walls, their large Sapele windows framing the garden. Sapele, a West African mahogany with an interlocked grain that produces a ribbon figure under quartersawing, also handles the entryway and the round-edged millwork, warming what would otherwise be a wholly mineral palette.
Larry Weaner Landscape Associates handled the meadow and the green roof, seeding both with regional natives so the planting climbs from ground level onto the structure without a visible seam. The low-maintenance approach lets the meadow behave like a meadow, successional and slightly unruly, against the stucco’s precision.
Vipp’s anodized aluminum V3 kitchen anchors the main room beneath a circular skylight, its vertically extruded profile and rounded edges rhyming with the ribbed stucco outside. The freestanding block returns the company to the metalwork Holger Nielsen started with in 1939. Around it, the modular Loft Sofa, wraparound curtains, and a custom travertine table in earth tones balance the fluid plan, and floor-to-ceiling glass doors dissolve the boundary to the pond.
