This truly unique home was designed by noted architect and scholar Adam Dayem and recently won second place in the American-Architects U.S. Building of the Year competition. The 3-BR/2.5-bath home is sited on open, rolling meadows, in a setting that affords privacy, as well as dramatic valley and mountain views. As enigmatic as it is practical, the structure has been conceived diagrammatically as two intersecting sleeve-like volumes. The sustainably sourced charred wood facade gives the house a rough, weathered texture, a contemporary reinterpretation of old barns in the Hudson Valley.

Adam Dayem is an architect and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the principal of actual / office, an architecture and design studio founded in 2004. In addition to running his architectural practice, Dayem teaches design studios and drawing courses at Rensselaer Architecture and Pratt Institute. His current research focuses on the nature of representation in contemporary architectural design and its evolving capacities to produce conceptual and formal novelty.

In a name, actual / office frames an attitude toward the practice of architecture. The freedom to actualize hidden potentials, bringing the previously unimagined into focus, is alternately separated from, and simultaneous to, the weight of responsibility and authority. The studio purposefully drifts between unencumbered speculations and tough realities. a/o takes on a wide variety of work including residential, exhibit design, furniture design, and research projects. a/o has won awards for theoretical architectural projects and research.