The Switchback house at Brant Lake, New York, was designed to be a vacation house for the growing families of twin brothers. The site is a steep hillside in the middle of a nine acre horse pasture that slopes to offer extraordinary views to Brant Lake below and the Adirondack Mountains beyond.

The two mandates—full (but invisible) wheelchair accessibility and sensitive integration into the natural topography—have been married in the ultimate design, which takes advantage of the pasture’s slope to create a gentle interior switchback ramp.  The main entry to the house is at the central mid-level landing, with the main living quarters on the downward ramp, the private quarters on the upward ramp. This interior ramp serves as the circulatory backbone of the house, its multiple generous landings connecting a series of programmatically-distinct stepped terraces each with its own direct access to the shifting exterior grade. Rather than allowing each ramp segment to be identical, the differing slopes and lengths were calibrated to be sensitive to the projected frequency of wheelchair travel.