Knight vision - home front: tips and trends from the world of residential design - Brief Article

Residential Architect, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Meghan Drueding

For 25 years, Blue Hill, Maine, architect Robert Knight has designed homes on or near the water. His experiences have left him particularly attuned to the qualities of a successful waterfront house--and they've, made him an ideal writer for The Taunton Press new book A House on the Water. On sale in October, the book showcases 23 houses on lakes, bays, and oceans, by architects from all over North America.

Knight noticed more than a few similarities between writing a book and designing a house. "In both processes you're creating and editing, then going back and forth with the editor or client, who also has a vision," he says. The project took up the same amount of time as a substantially sized architectural commission would--Knight spent more than 1,000 hours researching and writing it. Those hours included trips to every one of the homes he covered, from the critic Witold Rybczynski's Vermont lakeside house for his parents to Cutler Anderson's sod-roofed residence in the San Juan Islands near Seattle.

"My mission was to show people a wide range of houses that I thought worked," Knight says. "I wanted to avoid a cookbook sort of method where you say, 'Do this, do that, and you'll have a good house.' Designing a good house on the water is more of a right-brain, intuitive thing. But it is explainable. I tried to explain it in ways that don't turn off 'regular' people--those who aren't architects or builders."

Knight is candid about the time commitment his work on the book required. "It was brutal," he says. Luckily, business partner Peter d'Entremont stepped in and kept Knight Associates going. The author also found that his work on A House on the Water reinforced and strengthened his beliefs about design. "The single most critical part of a home's design is certainly the way it fits into its site and context," he says. "That was the first hurdle any of these houses had to jump to get into the book."