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Photography by Michael Robinson
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a large living room in a modern home
Proud parents usually show off their child's creativity by pointing out candy-colored paintings and lopsided clay bowls.
But Bob and Diane Hufft? They just open the door to their spectacular house.
It was designed by Matthew Hufft, their son, when he was 25.
"This was the first house I designed from scratch. Not bad for a first project," says Matthew, who in 2000 graduated (with honors) from the University of Kansas; won the prestigious Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation Traveling Fellowship in Interior Architecture; toured Asia for six months, and worked with Modernist architect Stanley Tigerman in Chicago. He received his graduate degree from Columbia University two years later and now, at 30, owns his own firm, hufft:projects llc, based in New York City. He runs it with the help of his bride, the former Jesse Rose Oberkirsch of Ballwin. He is also a visiting professor of architecture and media at the Pratt Institute.
"I am amazingly fortunate," concedes Matthew. "I went out on my own a year ago. Now I'm feeling the stress of the growing pains, but it's all stemmed from this one house. I know I will never have another piece of architecture that will be this important. Everything I do from here on out will be a grandson or great-grandson of this house."
There were bumps in the road. First: the self-doubt. "About a year and a half after I graduated, my mom called and said they wanted to build," Matthew says. "She asked if I wanted to be their architect. I said, 'Yeah, sure, I can be your architect.' And then I hung up the phone and said, 'I don't know if I can be their architect.'"
It took six months to find a piece of property that they all liked, in the woods of Springfield, Mo. Then there was the design. Matthew's style? Modernist. His parents' choice? French Country. Adjustments had to be made. First Bob and Diane sold every stick of furniture but one bench and two antique tables. While conceding to their son's inclinations, they leaned toward modern-lite. "I said, 'Contemporary is great but I want it to be warm contemporary ... clean but cozy,'" Diane recalls.
Matthew wanted a flat roof. They didn't. "They were very firm. They wanted it modern, but they wanted it tame," Matthew says. "It was slow going—lots of renderings and drawings and meetings and discussions."
Probably the greatest advantage of having parents as clients is an intimate knowledge of ... your clients. "My mother is very organized. I knew that the organization spaces would be very important, which is an interesting concept to go off of," Matthew says. "I knew in my initial concept that I wanted to pull the spaces apart. My dad [an orthopedic surgeon] has been talking about retiring, and I knew he would want his own retreat, his own office. The first thing I did was pull the library away from the house."
Bob likes to read, but he also enjoys working in a shop, making things, even just thinking about making things. So he has his own buildings, flanking his wife's.
"The essence of the plan is that the house--what I call the living--is in the middle," Matthew says. "The thinking and the doing are on both ends. In a way, my mom is in the middle and my dad is on both sides and the line [a retaining wall] connects them." Matthew named the continuum "The Line House."
For the architect/son, one residual effect of the assignment was a much clearer sense of self. "Working with them, I actually started to realize where I came from. It was fun," he says. "My mother's organization comes into me being an architect—in details, in the organization of the drawings, in how the space is organized. My dad used to teach physics, and his analytical thinking comes into the math and structure of it. I would talk to her a lot about finishes, what it is going to look like and where the flowers are going to be. And I talked to him a lot about the structure."
They started with a 10-page set of plans, but they designed as they built. "The fourth ingredient in the team was the contractor, Gary Herman," Matthew says. "He's a younger guy, very patient, very excited about doing something new. He was a blessing because he allowed us to design along the way."
Including the shop, the house (kitchen/dining/living room, master bedroom suite, rec room, two bedrooms, fitness center, office/laundry room and three and a half baths) and library (with a fourth bedroom and bath) total about 8,000 square feet. "It turned into a monster," Matthew says.
To bring the surrounding woods inside the house, Matthew incorporated walls of glass. He cantilevered the dining room out, to avoid cutting down trees and to give the room more of a treehouse effect. He utilized natural materials and ones normally seen in industrial construction: concrete (blocks, poured, pavers and tiles), steel, a metal roof, Rinskinst (a titanium zinc alloy) trim, and aluminum windows regularly found in storefronts. The house is built on a grid module of plywood and drywall with steel every eight feet. To let light into a hallway below, Matthew used glass blocks in the floor above; to brighten up the space beneath the dining room, he had a Japanese rock garden installed.
Matthew also tapped into one of his father's fascinations: "We have 14 or 15 different kinds of wood in this house," Bob says proudly. "I love wood." On the exterior, the Huffts used Western Red Cedar from Washington state, which they personally hand-stained, using a Dutch product called Sikkens. "It's a five-step process," Matthew explains. "We actually did it all; we set up a big shop downstairs."
The front door is mahogany, as is the front door to the master suite. The rec room floor and some of the cabinetry are built out of bamboo; a bathroom out of palm wood, another of teak; there is Wenge wood throughout; cabinets are European cherry with American walnut inlay; the library is constructed from walnut; one wall of the rec room is a piece of art made from leftover walnut branches; Bob's closet is aromatic red cedar.
One parameter for Matthew was his mother's insistence on one large kitchen/dining room/living room combo. The kitchen, pre-fabricated by Bulthaup in Germany, arrived in one large crate. "I designed it with the help of one of their designers," Matthew says. "It has a shutter system that comes down and everything can be hidden—the architect's dream."
The walls of the house are white; the color palette is grey and black with splashes of red. The bulk of the furniture came from Centro. Most of the floors are ceramic tile—an application which just won Matthew the 2006 Ceramic Tiles of Italy Design Competition.
The library is a post-and-beam structure, built in one day by six men from an Amish community in neighboring Stafford. Bob started treating the group's bone ailments more than two decades ago. Not blessed with great medical insurance, the Amish have always paid him by barter—helping him on his farm and delivering eggs, bread, even two pigs. On this house, they built the library, the shop and Bob's cedar walk-in closet. "The post and beams are my residual hanging on to French Country," Bob says. Matthew and Bob cut down the beams themselves and milled them on their farm in nearby Niangua, Mo. "We stacked them and let them dry for a year," Matthew says. The Amish then took the wood to cut and shape the wood in their own barns.
In the library, Bob displays his collections: books (classics, autographed, some first editions), duck decoys and Hummel figurines.
The Hummels were a problem. "My husband is a collector, and it has been really hard," Diane says. "We've let him keep a few things. Matthew wanted to build a drawer for this one collection and put them there to sleep so Bob could pull them out and look at them."
"I didn't win the battle," Matthew mutters.
"His mother had given him Hummels," Diane continues. "I love Hummels too, and they were perfect in our other house. We just didn't feel that they had a place out on a shelf here. But Bob was determined. So one night I caught him tiptoeing over from the shop to the library with this big box of stuff. And there he was, unpacking all his Hummels."
Another key element of the house's design is how an individual interacts with the space. "What they see is a big thing with me," Matthew says. When Bob sits in his library, he can see into his shop—and if both the shop's hangar doors are open, into the woods beyond. When you open the front door, you face an art display. But then again, it's almost redundant. The house itself is a spectacular piece of art—one that both parents and son can show off with pride.
