PLOT TWIST
In a right-angled world, Tom Givone’s torqued heritage farmhouse is an enthralling proposition
Tom Givone is waxi ng poetic over gravitational pulls and family connections. It’s not what you would expect to hear in a discussion about architecture, a field populated by professionals that, let’s face it, don’t realize when a layperson has absolutely no clue what they’re talking about.
Givone’s ambitious modern designs would lead you to think he, too, is part of this cabal but he’s actually just a gutsy guy who turned an obsession with old houses into a livelihood.
“I’m self-taught. I’ve never done any formal training outside of a bit of course work at the Columbia School of Architecture,” says the New York-based advertising copywriter- turned- designer. “I basically learned by buying these jalopy houses and making mistakes.”
Givone may be a risk-taker but he’s no fool. After tooling around with an idea, he will enlist an architect and engineer to realize his vision. “And then come hell or high water, I get it done,” he says. Thus far, he’s orchestrated five farmhouses and two row house renovations in New York in this manner.
These projects marry old and new construction in compelling ways: his stunning floating farmhouse in a storybook setting in the Catskill Mountains, for instance, retains an old- timey barn silhouette yet features a dramatic glass curtain wall and a porch that hovers over a stream. It was so successful people rent it through floatingfarmhouse.com for weddings, film shoots and extravagant dalliances.
Hi s latest derelictturned- divine triumph is a 2,000- square- foot 19thcentury farmhouse located beside a creek in Falls, Pa., a farming community 30 minutes outside Scranton. His clients had owned the dwelling for 26 years and were ready to torch the joint because it was in such rough shape, but then called in Givone for his opinion.
Letting go of this home wouldn’t have actually been as easy as setting a match to it after all. Givone discovered “( the owner) grew up in another old farmhouse across the street from it and she had eight siblings,” he says. “They went back and forth between the homes and they still do. The mother, brother and his family still live there. There’s a real emotional bond between these two families and homes.”
Givone pondered this relationship: “How do I render that bond physically and conceptually? What if this building bent, like gravity is pulling it toward that other house?”
Which is how the farmhouse addition, built over 16 months, came to have a molten funhouse- mirror effect. Slumping toward the client’s childhood home, it’s as though the structure was made of taffy that giant fingers pinched into place.
To fashion the wavy walls, t wo- by- f ours obviously wouldn’t do. So Givone, along with Scranton- based architects Joe Rominski and Rick Hammer of JRA Architects, commissioned Chicago Rolled Metal, which fabricates roller- coaster tracks among other things. Beneath the home’s anodized aluminum siding, five towering, curvaceous columns make up its skeleton and spine.
Givone chose the siding — “the same gorgeous material” that iPads are made of, he points out — because it’s a super- modern interpretation of traditional cladding. “It evokes the same classic pattern of farmhouse siding, with its horizontal, overlapping strips of wood.”
Without this tip of the hat to tradition, the addition would have felt jarring. Indoors, Givone tied old and new elements by uncovering hand- hewn beams and the 200- year- old wide- plank flooring that lay dormant beneath layers of linoleum and plywood in the kitchen. The refinished floors play nicely with the crisp white cabinetry and Carrara marble countertops; an apron sink was custom- made from the same slab.
Givone elegantly sums up the project: “The house is a sculptural expression of family connection.” It honours parts of the old, but also looks forward. The renovation was a process of rediscovery, during which the owners fell in love all over again with the property.
Initially, Givone wasn’t so sure it would all work out this way. “I had to sell an avant-garde structure to this incredibly conservative, nice family living in the middle of nowhere, and when I proposed it they said, ‘ OK, if you think it will work, that sounds good,’” he says. “I’ve got cutting- edge clients in New York who would never go for this, but this adorable family said, ‘We trust you.’”