Entrepreneur Roger Scommegna arrived at his meeting with Vetter Denk Architects with an unusual visual aid: a jug of screw-top wine (from his own vineyard) that retails for $9.99. "Simple packaging, and nothing fancy," Scommegna explains to Dwell. "I want good design, and I want it to be a surprise when someone opens up the wine or comes in the house." He left the wine with the architects before leaving.
Given this purposefully plebeian muse, architects John Vetter and Kelly Denk created a stylish prefab dwelling "like three shoeboxes stacked on top of each other," Scommegna describes. Aperture House keeps a low profile, with exteriors of cedar plywood, fiberboard interior walls, and floors of poured concrete, patched up with shag carpeting. "I'm hoping that when you are sitting here you get the feeling of simple, that you don't get the feeling of fussy," Scommegna says.
The architects built Aperture House to be affordable to build, with humble materials and simple lines. Dwell even writes that the architects, who won an American Institute of Architects award for this project, "has forged a partnership with a leading manufacturer of modular homes, and they are in the early stages of an ambitious plan to bring the Aperture House concept to the suburban mass market." Scommegna's home cost $300,000 to design and build, though Vetter and Denk say they can manufacture a more basic version for $199,900.
But did the house stay true to Scommegna's screw-top aspirations? "It's a little house," he says. "It does everything you need it to do. It does it humbly, with nature, and it's fun. You don't need anything else. It's perfect."
Find more photos, below. For the full set, head over to Dwell.
· Four Walls and a Screw-Top [Dwell]
· All The Printed Page posts [Curbed National]
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