Berry Road Residence

Project Type:  Single Family Residence Renovation 

Size: 3,300 square feet

Client: Brent Swift

Contractor: Brent Swift Design Build 

This spacious 1957 T-shaped Ranch house in Norman Oklahoma, offered us a delightful paradox. The dramatic simplicity of the exterior boundary suggested a highly rational and organized plan. Yet from the inside, the overwhelming space between perimeter walls had invited a disorderly assemblage of interior partitions that recalls the debate between “raumplan” and “plan libre”. Butzer Gardner seized the opportunity to establish congruence between the shell and its endoskeleton by partially ignoring the established modules of rooms and instead considering the public portion of the house as a loosely programmed gallery. 

The client for the project is an avid collector of modern furniture and a discriminate keeper of selected family memorabilia. With this in mind, the architects conceived the house not only as a machine for living, but also as a museum for exhibiting the lives and treasures of its inhabitants. By allowing the furniture to determine the function of an area, the space of the home is freed from the dimensional burdens of delineated rooms. 

The architects are careful to instill a sense of intricacy and softness to the home without deviating from the restrained aesthetic of a functional gallery space. To achieve this, they rely on careful curation of details and materials to provide a domestic sense of scale, tactility, and warmth. 

Photographs by Tim Hursley

*Completed as Butzer Gardner Architects