For more than 35 years, we’ve partnered with the South’s best designers, designers, contractors, and developers to produce homes that commemorate the Southern way of life and the most recent developments in domestic style. In case you missed the announcement last month, our 2024 Idea House is currently under construction in Kiawah River, a seaside community simply 20 miles from historic Charleston, South Carolina. Now, we’re pulling back the curtain a little more, sharing insights from this year’s skilled group.
The Inspiration
Because our Idea House is positioned in a special enclave across the street from Kiawah River Farm (which features produce and flower fields, in addition to a goatery), our designers, led by Kirsten Schoettelkotte of MHK Architecture, were asked to design with regard for the area’s longstanding agrarian character.
” We immediately started looking at historical farmhouses throughout the Lowcountry,” recalls Schoettelkotte. “I went on a drive with my partner to Helen, Georgia. We took all the backroads we might just to see what’s still standing, what’s still around, to really get a sense of what the old farms appear like.”
Beyond the agrihood’s standards, an historic-feeling farmhouse just felt appropriate for the place, states Schoettelkotte. “Johns Island [the area of the Kiawah River neighborhood] has always been a farming area because the soils are a lot better.”
The Historic Farmhouse
In referencing historic farmhouses, both on her rural drive and her deep dives into the South Carolina Picture Project [a visual database of state landmarks, consisting of homes], Schoettelkotte acknowledged a trademark of these farmsteads: Most were developed first with a main home (a lot of which had decks for water-shedding and breeze-catching relief in pre-A/C days) and after that grew in time, with additions tacked on, out-buildings built, and decks enclosed with the arrival of central heating and air.
She and her group have actually followed that thread in the designing of the 2024 Idea House, slowing with a primary structure with 3 dormers and a wraparound porch, then layering in a taller right wing of the house, as well as a detached carriage house that’s linked to your home through a brief covered pathway. “It assists tell a story,” says Schoettelkotte. “That was always the goal for me. I want somebody to walk up to this house and seem like the trees grew around it … like if your house had actually been there forever, this is how it would have grown.”
It’s difficult to reject the enduring appeal of these traditional Lowcountry farmhouses, and the architect has her own ideas about why. “First, it’s familiar. We all acknowledge it, and home should be familiar,” she states. “I believe, 2nd, it’s basic; it’s not placing on airs.” It’s also about the feeling it evokes, the “hard-earned relaxing” that happens when you’re sitting in a rocker on the farmhouse’s front patio, she says: “You’re in the shade; you’ve had a long, hard day; and this is where everything type of settles and you can just breathe.”