Best of Design: New Home
Using nature as the guide, architect Mike Gwin designed a sustainable family home in Cheswick that’s in harmony with its wooded environment.
March 11, 2021
PHOTOS BY ED MASSERY AND JESSE REISMEYER
When Renee Gwin discovered a heavily wooded, 10-acre property in Cheswick, pocked with deep valleys and deemed practically unbuildable, she knew she’d found the perfect location for her family’s new home.
After all, her husband, Rothschild Doyno Collaborative Principal Mike Gwin, loves a good design challenge.
The couple, longtime city dwellers who had previously renovated a Victorian-era house in Lawrenceville, wanted their new home to be a 21st-century sanctuary, existing in harmony with its environment and filled with modern amenities. In order to get the balance just right, Mike had to first understand the landscape they’d just purchased the way the prevailing breeze moved through the valleys, the amount of noise trickling in from the road, the