When lightning struck a patch of land on Owls Head, a “Scandinavian Wonderland” was born.
“The soil that resulted from the burn is both rich and quite acidic,” said Andrew Frederick, founder of carbon-capture design build firm, Croft. “There are lots of small white pines, blueberries, huckleberries, lichens, and juniper––a lot of juniper––that has spread over the hilltop.”
While Frederick admits the details of the lightning strike remain fuzzy, perhaps a flare of local legend, the story echoes the ethos that presided over his work building his family’s home, Slo Haus: through the utmost attention to the land and environs, they could make something functional, climate-positive, and beautiful.
Frederick founded Croft with the mission of emphasizing a structure-first design principle and using organic materials with incredible carbon-capture potential. Slo Haus provided him with an ideal test kitchen as he sought to build a suitable family home fundamentally aligned with his principles, all in a space that’s only 1,040 square feet.
Slo Haus was constructed on human exertion. Frederick never used a single piece of heavy equipment on the job site. He crafted the kitchen cabinets from a maple tree they felled at their old house. He poured the foundation by hand and, with no driveway access and one part time helper, carried one 80-pound bag of concrete a quarter mile in from the edge of the forest at a time.
“It was like a circus of stupidity in terms of the amount of pressure to put on oneself,” said Frederick.
“I’ve always been fascinated by what we can accomplish with human power,” he added, “to look at how skewed our ideas are surrounding construction, energy, and what you can do with one dollar. It’s astonishing to think that I worked that hard for 18 months and burned through the energy equivalent––in terms of calories––of about 17 dollars in petroleum.”
In addition to the human power, Frederick labored over the home’s siting to optimize the relationship with the landscape. When the front door opens, the view down the hallway extends through a narrow window on the other end of the building, from which they can spy Seal Ledge, miles away through the water.
“Beginning the design process at the structural level, you wind up with certain, very subtle elements on the interior. Your hand-applied plaster disappears perfectly into a window well, or you’re articulating spaces with apertures at proper locations,” said Frederick.
One of his favorite design flourishes descends from the heavens. A skylight on the second floor wraps from the roof plane onto an exterior wall, creating a book nook in his daughter’s room.
Recognizing that most commercial glass in the Northeast is sputtered with a microscopic coat of tin, nickel, or silver to reflect heat indoors, Frederick saw an opportunity to harness the reflected light as well. He sited the house so that during the winter months, sunset pours through the skylight, reflects off the glass sliding door, and bathes the dining table in a soft amber glow as they sit for dinner.
“Starting the design at the level of the literal cosmos, we created these moments that bring people together and respond to the way you live your discrete, small life on this planet.”
Seeing what beautiful results such attention could render, Frederick promotes these principles with his clients.
“We need to make do with less; we just need more elegant systems of doing the things that we would like to do. This was an opportunity for me to explore what those systems might be.”
He draws inspiration from Croft’s organic solutions. They partner with organic Maine farmers to grow lumber and straw for insulation.
“We can build and design anything we want using these materials,” said Frederick. “It can look like a historic Maine cape or ultra modern. To capture and store carbon from the atmosphere inside the building, you’re fighting climate change, and the byproducts of your efforts are more organic food and more housing.”
In this same spirit, his favorite touch with Slo Haus sits at its very foundation. Noting that the ledge on Owls Head is fairly unstable, Andrew and his wife, Betsy, wanted to preserve as much of the landscape as possible while building a stable home. Instead of dynamiting the cap of the hill, they dug at the ledge by hand until they’d chiseled a solid bearing surface. Through a system of stem walls to pick up the building’s lateral and shear loads and square piers pinned directly to the bedrock, they innovated a minimalist, elegant solution that’s nearly invisible.
“The way that we built the house was so conscientious of the landscape that even the day we moved in, there were blueberries growing six inches away from the foundation that were undisturbed.”
