Easton Combs Architects
Rona Easton and Lonn Combs are the husband-and-wife team behind the award-winning architecture firm Easton Combs Architects
In 2014 Rona Easton and Lonn Combs, the husband-and-wife team behind the award-winning architecture firm EASTON COMBS Architects, moved to the Berkshires. After 13 years in New York City working on large-scale commercial and institutional projects, the move to rural Massachusetts offered the two the opportunity to expand the practice into residential work, which included their own home.
Their Berkshire County residence has become a prototype for the firm’s high-performance houses, which seamlessly blend passive environmental strategies with strikingly essentialist design. “It’s where we proved out all the systems we specified for all of our projects,” says Combs.
Now, when clients ask what a high-performance home can look and feel like, Easton and Combs simply invite them to come experience theirs. “We completely understand how it feels to live in a non-toxic, healthy, well-insulated, well-ventilated home, and how different and comfortable it is,” says Easton.
Like all of their projects, the house utilizes the principles of Passive House design, an internationally recognized standard of energy efficiency. Passive design strategies provide future-oriented benefits to both human and environmental health, like higher air quality and the ability to achieve net-zero energy consumption with the implementation of offsets like solar or wind. “The more of our homes that aren’t locked into oil, propane, and natural gas the more flexible our energy sources can be,” says Combs.
Since residential implementation of these technologies is still relatively new in the US, the architects prioritize the role that education must play for both their clients and the trades they work with. “Through the process [of building our home], we educated a lot of people in our wider community of builders and tradespeople, and those best practices have filtered over into their other projects,” Combs says. “That dialogue is a really important part of our mission.”
With clean lines and a charcoal-hued exterior thoughtfully punctuated by large expanses of light, the couple’s home both contrasts and enhances its rural environment—a relationship characteristic of all their residences. “The aesthetics are boiled down to the most important components, like what can we do with natural light, a simple materials palette, and the views and beautiful rural settings we have the privilege to work in here,” says Combs.
“Light is something that’s really central to the way we design. What the orientation of a window is, how the light will enter the space, how the sunlight will fall,” says Easton. “Nothing is ever accidental.”
EASTON COMBS Architects
eastoncombs.com
info@eastoncombs.com
MA: (413) 591-8475
NY: (347) 410-9088
Related: The High-Performance Home Series by Rona Easton and Lonn Combs
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
