The FreshGrass Annex, the new addition to Porches Inn by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, translates North Adams's mill-town roofs and local Shaker heritage into a new hotel wing that’s capturing Our Attention.
Photo of the Porches new FreshGrass Annex by Timothy Hursley courtesy of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects.
The newest building at Porches Inn in North Adams, called the FreshGrass Annex, has a metal sawtooth roof angled to catch the sun, siding and decking made entirely of ash, and ten guest rooms that were framed off-site and raised into place in about two weeks. The roofline is a direct homage to the mill buildings visible from its windows now Mass MoCA; the windows also mimic metal industrial pragmatism rather than New England house style.
What the client really loved about what we do is that we take a deep dive into regionalism," says Talbot Sweetapple, a partner at MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the Halifax, Nova Scotia firm behind the building. "How do you reinterpret regional history for modern living? We don't represent the past, because the past is a different living situation, a different reason for building houses."
The building, completed earlier this year and opened in full this spring, succeeds at looking modern while pulling on a viewer’s points of reference for the visual language of local architecture and the industry has taken notice. Sweetapple says the firm just learned it received an AIA New England Design Award.
The firm also recently opened their first satellite office on the MASS MoCA campus, with a number of new projects in the works in the Berkshires and Hudson Valley.
The project's path to North Adams runs through a golf course in Muskoka, Ontario. Porches is owned by Jack and Susy Wadsworth, who also own a property on Bigwin Island, in Ontario's lake district. "My partner Brian MacKay-Lyons and I were invited to do a small competition to design these club cabins on Bigwin Island," Sweetapple says. "We ended up winning the competition, and we built three of these beautiful little cabins." That project formed the relationship. Not long after, the Wadsworths mentioned they had another property, in North Adams, and were thinking about guest room additions and a small restaurant. "We said, yeah, that'd be great," Sweetapple says. "So we went down there and met them."
By the time the North Adams project came up, MLSA had built a track record of deep regional research in its home turf of Atlantic Canada, and Jack Wadsworth wanted to know what that would look like applied to a Massachusetts mill town. "Jack said, all that makes sense for the work you've done at this point," Sweetapple recalls. "But I'm really curious what you're going to do in North Adams. How are you going to respond to North Adams to make it of place?’"
Sweetapple wasn't starting from zero. He's taught studio courses for close to three decades, and had already been bringing students to the region to study the Shakers for years. That background shows up throughout the annex. The sawtooth roof, oriented to hold solar panels on its angled faces, is a direct reference to the roofline found across the mill buildings of North Adams but the design also leans on Shaker restraint and other vernacular touchstones. "The interiors were greatly inspired by the Shakers," he says. "They were definitely sitting on our shoulder while we were designing, trying to make things more practical and poetic rather than fashionable."
Sustainability was also a mandate. "You'll see the wood-on-wood-on-wood (aesthetic), which is still one of the more sustainable materials out there," Sweetapple says, adding that the building process used no preservatives on its exterior, using thermally modified ash siding sourced from New Brunswick, Canada that will weather more naturally. Douglas fir was used extensively throughout the interiors.
If the mills and the Shakers shaped the annex's materials, its underlying idea came from somewhere more specific: a book. "The word porches was a big thing, right?" Sweetapple says. "Susy, was really instrumental—she gave us a book on porches right at the beginning. What is the meaning of a porch in terms of the social aspect of it?" The firm ran with it. "We sort of tripled down on the word porch," Sweetapple says. "You'll see probably six or seven variations of a porch just in our project"—a grand porch, an interior porch, private porches off individual rooms, porches that double as balcony seating for outdoor events. He points to the architect Louis Kahn as a touchstone: "He said you've got to make good architecture as spaces for one person, two people, ten people, two hundred people, where they all feel comfortable in those settings."
The porches are also built to shift with the weather and time of day. "If it's raining, you go to this porch. If it's sunny, you go to this porch. If it's nighttime and you're listening to music, you go to that porch," Sweetapple says. "There's a real social choreography going on."
Urbanistically, the annex was also designed to close a gap. Porches refers to its whole property as a campus, and the new building completes a quad behind the original row houses, alongside Studio 9, a carbon-neutral recording and performance venue the client built in 2019. The layout creates something close to an amphitheater, with the quad's lawn sloped toward the music hall. "They had an event last week where everyone's sitting on the lawn because it's raked," Sweetapple says, "and all of a sudden the building we designed, with all its porches, created bleacher-style seating. And the second floor room porches were sort of balcony seating."
MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple has been building a presence in the region well beyond this one project. The firm recently opened a North Adams office—small for now, Sweetapple says, but meant to grow. It has completed a private house in Germantown, New York, and has projects underway in Williamstown and the Connecticut River Valley. Sweetapple traces the firm's affinity for the area to its own outsider instincts, noting that the practice has always worked on the periphery rather than in big cities. "We fell in love with the region and its scale," he says. "The landscape is amazing. And so we’re in it now, hook, line, and sinker."
Porches marks its 25th anniversary on August 28, with MacKay-Lyons himself scheduled to appear on a panel discussion at the property that day.
231 River Street, North Adams, MA 01247
