INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Great houses are focal points where many influences come to bear. The environment – including landscape, climate and community – architectural traditions and social trends, and the skills and personalities of owners, builders and architects are some of the elements that define the existential space into which these memorable structures emerge.
In the best houses the influences blend but remain distinct so that each important element can be seen clearly in the harmonious whole.
That is what happened at the Brunnstrom house in Windsor, where island architect Clem Schaub’s modernist interpretation of the Anglo-Caribbean style the community is known for recently won the Florida/Caribbean Design Award from the American Institute of Architects.
The story of the house begins, in one sense, in the 17th century when English adventurers and settlers began to inhabit the dreamy tropical islands to our south, bringing with them the architecture they knew, including the classic English cottage that prevailed with regional variations throughout southern and central England at that time.
“English cottages didn’t have overhangs,” says Schaub. “After a few rainy seasons the settlers realized they needed to keep water off of their houses and added the wide eaves we associate with the style. They were converting their cottages into tropical houses.”
The Stuart and Hanover-era remodelers could not simply extend their steep pitched roofs to create eaves, however, because the angle would have dropped the overhand in front of their windows. So they broke the roof line, extending eaves at a shallower angle, creating the flipped-up look that is a key characteristic of Anglo-Caribbean architecture and that is plainly visible in the home Schaub designed for Ulf and Jiwon Brunnstrom.
Schaub says other features of the historical style include simple materials, such as stucco and clapboard, and indoor-outdoor living spaces suited to hot summers and mild winters.
“Anglo-Caribbean homes are always one-room deep for cross ventilation,” he adds. “Ceilings are typically high to allow warm air to rise and be taken away.”
The practical hybrid style developed by English settlers in Barbados, Jamaica and the Bahamas appealed to the developers of Windsor when they began to imagine a picturesque seaside village that combined the charms of yesterday with the comforts of today, while pointing to a sustainable future.
Situated on 416 acres just north of the town of Orchid, Windsor was founded in 1989 by Canadian businessman W. Galen Weston and his wife Hilary Weston, and in another sense the story of the Brunnstrom house begins then.
Besides picking a prevailing architectural style for the club-centered luxury community, the Westons incorporated aspects of New Urbanism in their vision, employing Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company to create the design. The company is a leader in New Urbanism theory and practice and the quality it brought to the project was integral to the Brunnstroms’ decision to build in Vero Beach.
Key features of New Urbanism include sustainability, walkability and traditional neighborhood structure with mixed housing stock and higher density than most suburban developments. Along with the climate and seaside setting, the community’s distinctive plan called out to the Brunnstroms.
“We came to Vero because of Windsor,” says Jiwon Brunnstrom. “We fell in love with it.”
Ulf Brunnstrom, an investment banker, and Jiwon, a writer, live in London and Jiwon says they tried to find something like Windsor in Europe but couldn’t.
“They have similar clubs in Italy and Spain,” she says, “but when the golf is nice, the tennis is missing or vice versa – or there was no beach. Windsor was the only place that had everything.”
The couple purchased an 11,700-square-foot lot in the South Village in 2006 and gave Schaub the commission to create a family holiday home that would instill lifelong memoires of living in the tropics for them and their two children.
They could not have chosen better. Schaub is a renowned architect who has designed approximately 50 homes in Windsor along with several of the major public buildings. His work has been extensively reported on and praised in “Architecture,” “Classical Modern Architecture,” “Southern Living Magazine,” “New York Times” and a long list of other publications.
“I always say it is more Clem’s house than ours, but we love it,” says Jiwon Brunnstrom. “I think with a truly gifted architect, that is how it should be. We told him which of his houses in Windsor we liked best and then gave him carte blanche.”
Schaub and his associates say Jiwon actually made significant contributions to the home.
“She selected the statue in the entry atrium, which I think really activates the space,” says Christine Pokorney, who designed much of the home’s interior. “She had strong ideas of what she wanted in landscaping. She said she had to have bamboo, and she wanted plants that would be flowering when she was here. She also selected hibiscus because it is the national flower of Korea.”
With 9,300 square feet under roof, the scope of the house is impressive but not overwhelming. Its knockout power comes more from the subdued intensity of its design and the quality of its construction.
“It took us 20 months with 30 men working to build the house,” says John Huryn, owner of Huryn Construction, the man the Brunnstroms hired to materialize their architect’s vision.
As with Schaub, they chose wisely. Huryn has built approximately 30 homes in Windsor, which is more than 10 percent of the existing housing stock, and he is working on two new houses there now.
“It was a challenging structure,” Huryn says. “Much of it is poured concrete, and it has an eight-foot-deep wrap-around veranda supported by sculpted, tapered concrete beams that go all the way through the house. Our carpenters did all the custom formwork and pouring of that concrete.”
In keeping with the ideals of classic modern architecture, the home’s interior has a clean simple look and feel, which is harder to create than it looks.
“The devil is in the details,” Schaub says. “The house is simple, but sometimes simplicity requires twice as much effort as making something elaborate. You have to find ways to hide systems and machines and still stay with the building code.”
The home’s most notable feature and organizing principle is its Anglo-Caribbean indoor-outdoor quality. Of the 9,300 square feet under roof, only about 3,600 square feet are air conditioned, according to Huryn.
Operating out of an ideal of simplicity, drawing on both history and modernity, Schaub created a house that achieves sustainability primarily through intelligent integration with its environment.
The house is oriented to block cold winds from the north in winter and capture prevailing summer breezes. The wide wrap-around veranda not only creates a distinct tropical ambiance but keeps out the heat of the sun while letting cooling air circulate through interior and exterior living areas.
When you enter the home’s front door, you are still outside, in a two story atrium with a vent hole at the top and fountain that collects rainwater at the bottom. The fountain flows out into an ornamental pool with a platform for practicing hatha yoga in the middle.
The indoor/outdoor sensation is enhanced by a flow of paving material from patio areas to the interior, and by the use of the same woods and metals inside and out.
“I love the fact that so much of it is outdoors,” says Schaub. “It is totally old school. That is the way people lived in past. At the same time, it is quite modern in detail. I like walking both lines architecturally.”
Passive sustainability is the best kind of sustainability because it doesn’t require any complex technology or exterior energy source to function. It simply analyzes the environment and situates living spaces to take maximum advantage of the way the world is in a specific place.
“One of my passions is having things naturally ventilated and oriented to the sun,” Schaub says. “This is one of our best homes in that regard, in having so many outdoor living areas and utilizing them for daily life.”
The Brunnstroms use the house mainly at Christmas and Easter, when their 14-year-old twins have school vacations, and for a couple of weeks in June and July. In every season, the home preforms its silent functions, moderating the climate and linking the human lives within it to the tropical world around it.
“They love the house,” Schaub says.
So does the AIA.