Tennis House

Washington, CT

This small guesthouse and tennis court draws its inspiration from the site’s history as an earthwork and its new life as a meadow. Sited within a protected watershed, the tiny pavilion, containing overlook space, changing rooms and a washroom, perches above the court. The playing surface is surrounded by board-formed concrete retaining walls whose tops rise and fall with the grade of the hillside, obscuring the court from view except from inside the little building. The basin that now houses the project was formerly a gravel quarry, a raw terrain covered in weeds and wild flowers with a spring-fed pond at its center; it has now been restored to a pristine natural state.

Deep roof overhangs protect the pavilion’s southern and western exposures from solar heat gain in summer months. Covered in the wild grasses, flowering weeds, and sedums that flourish in the quick draining soils of the surrounding landscape, the roof plane of grass is punctuated by the chimney and a skylight which illuminates the windowless changing rooms below. The building is heated and cooled entirely by a ground source heat pump that uses the water of the quarry pond as a thermal mass. Providing significant reductions in the use of fossil fuels, the system eliminates oil and gas deliveries, thereby freeing the land from the kind of heavy vehicular traffic that until recently had given the landscape its form and character.