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Anne Matheis
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a hallway with a built-in blond wood cabinets
Paul and Shari Bussmann describe a walk through their home as a relaxing hike on a nature trail. Their 2-year-old daughter, Ava, unknowingly adds to that ambience.
"Fly, I'm a bird!" she sings while flapping her arms and bouncing on her bed. "Fly, fly, fly, fly!"
Along with the chirps coming from her bedroom, tokens of nature inside and outside the house help set the scene. A curvy branch extends from floor to ceiling in the kitchen. Layers of leaves and branches outside are the only coverings for the windows and glass doors throughout the house; they shelter it from neighboring homes and the street.
The bustle of Manchester Road is just a mile away, but from this perch among the trees in Warson Woods, it seems like a place from another lifetime.
"When you come in from the road, you don't have a sense of what's up here," Paul says, remembering the first time he saw the house. "Coming into the house and stepping onto the deck, seeing the pond with a little dappled light, it was more about the context of the house than it was the house itself."
The house, of course, has had its great woodsy location since Buford Pickens, dean of the Washington University School of Architecture from 1953 to 1956, erected it in the '50s with a team of students. The traditional furnishings of the original owner, however, along with the drywall and popcorn ceilings popular during that period, prevented the home from working closely with nature.
Shari remembers being attracted to the "good, modern bones" of the house and its potential to open up to its natural surroundings.
"We realized how closed up a lot of houses are," she says. "The windows are smaller and you feel very indoors in a home. In our house, because there are windows everywhere and we're close to nature--there are trees right next to the house--it seems as if we're outdoors even when we're indoors."
With their experience from their own graphic design business, the Bussmanns entered the renovation with several of their own ideas. The glass that covers most of the walls made Paul want to turn the home into "a lens on nature."
"We wanted to make that connection as strong as we could while at the same time being low impact, trying to preserve nature, not take anything away from it," he says.
The project of transforming the house into a kind of treehouse was not all fun and games. During a process that took about three years, the couple worked closely with architect Phil Durham, playing with various ideas, solidifying plans and battling the constant complications, er, surprises that arose.
"There was a lot of funky stuff going on, a lot of things that weren't square and a few places that were a little under-structure," Durham says. "It's just par for the course for houses of that age."
The time spent repeatedly adjusting plans was well worth it.
"Before the renovation, sitting out on the deck and looking out was the best," Shari says. "But now, I love every part of our house."
