Mr. Rose - an architect who is distinguishing himself with public structures and houses of ethereal lines, space and light - could have renovated, or, of course, demolished. His first marriage was ending, though, and he and his young son and daughter had experienced enough loss. The Belmont house was to be a new start. So he turned to a presumably mundane genre of architecture - the addition - and gave it a twist.
The central challenge with additions is always how to merge old and new without making a discordant, dysfunctional mess, but Mr. Rose's problem presented itself in the extreme. Adding a modern wing to the existing house would have been like marrying a sleek young comer to a drab old dud.
So Mr. Rose wrapped it. He put the old house in a box.
He constructed an abstract cedar screen around the 3,500-square-foot house, kept the windows but widened them, added a second-floor deck and built his addition onto the deck, in place of the garage. Now the cedar box meets an additional 3,500-square-foot expanse of glass and copper, which is already mellowing nicely in the New England weather.
In certain light you can see through the cedar screen to the old house, to the past. "Maybe this is slightly contradictory, but I do like the layering of history," said Mr. Rose, 45. "In the case of my two older children and me, this house was where we sort of put our lives back together. I wanted there to be a vestige of that."
The old wing holds four bedrooms, four and a half baths, a playroom and a music room. (Mr. Rose is a talented classical pianist and an opera devotee.) The new wing has the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the master bedroom, two upstairs offices and three decks, including one on the roof, accessible by an exterior glass staircase that ascends through the limbs of a majestic old maple. A whimsical bonus on the roof deck is a wood-burning fireplace, as well as a downward view of the old house's pitched roof and bracing, like a stage set.
Copper House, as the $800,000 project was called, has an altogether sculptural, almost balletic, force - at every turn, interplay between extremes of hard, soft, heavy and light. Mr. Rose defined the dining space with a glass and steel staircase, a sculptural beech server and a monolithic bluestone fireplace. The fireplace is repeated in the living room, which steps down with the grade of the site, as if "feathered into the landscape," as Terence Riley, the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, has said generally of Mr. Rose's designs.
FLOOR-TO-CEILING windows make up the north wall, angled to incorporate the maple tree and opening the house to the generous yard. An oversize scupper, another Rose signature, frames the west entrance. Inside, Mr. Rose joined the two wings with a three-story atrium traversed by another glass staircase. This airy unification of past and present is the only place the fusion hasn't been camouflaged and is the first thing visitors see upon entering the house; Mr. Rose put it right out there, like a confession.
To temper the aggressiveness of the angles made by so much glass, concrete and steel, he used rich woods: mahogany to frame windows, and rosewood, mahogany and bamboo in the floors. Also, subtle colors.
"I wanted to telegraph to people that children live here," said Pam Moore, Mr. Rose's wife. A former reporter for Business Week, Ms. Moore married Mr. Rose in 2001; they have a 3-year-old son who races around the open floors on toy fire engines and adroitly navigates the house's harder edges. (He eases down the main staircase on his bottom and calls it "frumping.")
"I wanted the colors to be warm," Ms. Moore said. "I didn't want it to be too serious, like a museum."
They painted the interior steel columns navy blue, echoing tones of the aging exterior copper. The walls (the palest pumpkin and yellow) reflect the summer greens and autumnal reds and golds of the surrounding maples and honey locusts. In this way, the house feels almost organic. The copper shifts color with sun and snow; the cedar is a willing canvas for rain. It's quite a contrast to the predominant Victorians and Cape Cods, which don't embrace the frigid New England winter so much as hunker down and bear it.
Mr. Rose brought to Copper House an aesthetic that might have started with backyard projects at his childhood home in Garden City, N.Y., but crystallized when he was an undergraduate and graduate student in architecture at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard. He went to Princeton to study physics but quickly became interested in solar architecture, which, along with later courses in landscape architecture, informs his work today.
"The key thing about him is his wonderful sense of how a building relates to its site and the landscape beyond," Mr. Riley said. In his introduction to "Charles Rose, Architect," a monograph to be published in March by Princeton Architectural Press, Mr. Riley recalls Henry James's impression of New England as an "uncastled" landscape, noting that Mr. Rose's work seems to spring from similar aesthetic principles: an instinct to conform to the landscape rather than dominate it. "Frank Lloyd Wright understood that as well," Mr. Riley said.
Mr. Rose applies this awareness far beyond New England, as well as in the classroom. He has taught at universities including Harvard and M.I.T., drawing notice as an architect establishing his name relatively early with increasingly complex, coveted projects. He designs primarily for the arts, government and universities - a 65,000-square-foot campus center at Brandeis University, for instance, and Camp Paintrock in Wyoming, both of which won American Architecture Awards.
Mr. Rose is particularly proud of his work for Paintrock, a youth development program founded by John R. Alm, the chief executive of Coca-Cola Enterprises, for smart and ambitious but poor teenagers from Los Angeles. The participants, all rising high school freshmen, spend the summer like cliff dwellers, in cabins cantilevered over the canyon.
"It sets up conditions that are completely disassociative with the environment they come from," Mr. Rose said. "Some of the philosophy isn't unlike the transcendentalists - this very reliant, American approach to existence, where there's power in the landscape."
Of course landscapes can also mean the searing South Texas plateaus or the urban grid of Manhattan, where Mr. Rose is designing a penthouse on East 22nd Street for the violin star Joshua Bell. In 2004 Mr. Rose's firm, Charles Rose Architects of Somerville, Mass., won a competitive commission from the Design Excellence Program of the federal General Services Administration for one of a dozen or so new border stations. The entry point - now being built in Del Rio, Tex., on the Mexican border - had to simultaneously convey welcome and authority, on a budget.
"He took a very basic premise and used bold strokes to get across something that could have been as nondescript and uninteresting as a toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike," said Ed Feiner, who was the chief architect for the General Services Administration when Mr. Rose won the commission. "Most impressive is his ability to take a somewhat austere budget and a somewhat austere palette of materials and create something extremely innovative and creative in form."
Mr. Rose built Copper House with similar frugality in mind. Using off-the-shelf copper sheeting, for example, he kept the costs for the project to about $140 a square foot, compared with the $250 to $450 that his projects typically cost.
He finished the house in 2004. Now he and Ms. Moore are slowly furnishing it with their own creations. For her upstairs office Mr. Rose made an origami showpiece of a mahogany desk that includes a built-in work area for their son. And they recently installed the dining room table, which they designed together: an oval bubinga wood surface (Moore) over geometric steel legs (Rose).
"Every architect should have to build a house and then live in it," Mr. Rose said. "This building gives me great feedback every day." The handrail on the main stairs, for instance: block mahogany with a finger groove. "I slide my hand down it every morning," he said. "It's not a big deal, and yet it's this wonderful little element that I encounter every day.
"Houses only need a few wonderful moments like that if you interact with them in a ritualistic way."
