Set on a wide, tree-lined lot in Bergen County, New Jersey, Three Arches began as a house its owners had already built — and had never felt at home in. What stood there was builder-grade: a big house, no details, proportions set by square footage rather than by an idea. Not a period house. A house wearing the outline of one. The commission was not to add rooms. It was to reframe the house entirely.

The direction surfaced in conversation. Across a series of meetings devoted less to program than to the clients themselves — where they came from, how they gather, what stays with them — a pointed arch was drawn. The response was immediate: it looked like home. From that single gesture, the rest of the architecture followed.

The entry façade is now composed as three pointed arches, a device borrowed from the monumental architecture of the Mediterranean. The center arch frames and elevates the front door; the two flanking arches establish balance and rhythm across the elevation. Above it, a semicircular window opens the second floor to light — a quiet nod to Palladio, and a counterpoint of round to pointed that settles the composition. Smooth, authentic plaster-like stucco carries the forms, its seamless surface allowing the arches to be sculpted from the wall rather than applied to it, and giving the massing room to be playful without becoming busy.

Because that surface reads cool and monolithic, cedar was introduced for warmth: a bracketed pergola over the garage, and stacked pergolas shading the rear terraces above the garden. The mahogany entry door, the pergolas and the interior millwork were all built in-house, which is what allows a drawn radius to survive from sketch to installation. The gesture is both practical and vernacular — the trellis and the shaded terrace belong to the same architectural tradition the arches came from, and they carry it from the street to the back of the house.

The result is a home the family recognizes as their own — coherent where it was assembled, specific where it was generic, and particular to the people who live inside it.

Architecture + Construction + Interior Design + Millwork