JOIN USA labour of love, work in progress...
The two-story home Vicco von Voss built for his family in Centreville, Maryland, is more like a giant piece of custom-made furniture than a house. For starters, there are no nails in the frame; it’s held together entirely with wooden pegs in an impressive display of mortise-and-tenon joinery.
And every plank and beam was milled on site by hand, most from fallen trees collected nearby and salvaged. So it will come as no surprise that it took a little longer to build than the average house. In fact, after 10 years, it’s still a work in progress.
Dreaming the beginning
Vicco, 46, began dreaming about it in the late 90s, when he was in his 20s. A furniture maker from Hamburg, Germany, he was working to establish his business at the time, and was living as cheaply as possible on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a one-room, 110-square-foot cabin he built himself.
It had neither electricity nor running water; a small wood-burning stove provided heat (and hot water, if there was enough left in the 55-gallon cistern for an occasional shower).
But there was a loft bed under a skylight, and that was where he began mapping out the blueprint in his head, he said, “down to the very last inch.” Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and the barns in the surrounding countryside, he envisioned a light-filled wooden structure that would blend in with the trees.
By the time he met his wife a decade later, the house was partly built, but money was still tight, so he was renting it out and living in the cabin. Jacqueline von Voss, an acupuncturist and holistic health practitioner who is now 37, wasn’t put off by his rustic living conditions. In fact, they were part of what won her over. “I had followed my head for so long, living in Boston and Philadelphia and building my business,” she said. “But when I met Vicco and stayed in the cabin, something fell into gear. I just realised, this is my person and this is my place. They both felt like home to me.”
Soon after, the couple married and moved into the half-finished house. And construction proceeded, at its own leisurely pace. With hundreds of varieties of trees contributing to the design - Eastern white pine, cherry, cypress, swamp maple, cedar and oak, among others - it wasn’t always easy to decide where each piece should go.
‘It’s right in front of you’
“I let the wood speak to me,” said Vicco, who used aromatic cedar in the bathroom and cherry for the rafters of the barrel-vaulted ceiling. “You might be looking everywhere for the right piece of wood, and it is usually right in front of you. But you have to wait for it.”
And all of it had to be aged three years per inch, so the boards could “expand and contract through the seasons,” Vicco said. “Wood is just like wine that way.” But some things won’t wait on the wood. “There were a few things I insisted on before moving in,” Jacqueline said. “One was a door for the bathroom.”
Another thing that couldn’t wait was a door to the nursery. Four years ago, when she was eight months pregnant with their daughter, Ella, Jacqueline was eager for her husband to finish the door so he could put up the drywall and get the rest of the nursery ready in time.
“When Vicco goes into his artistic realm,” she said, “the business side of me sometimes has to come in and say, 'Yes, yes, I know you’re working on a masterpiece, but you also have to get it done.'” Nevertheless, Vicco spent weeks carving the cherry and yellow wood for that door, and fitting the pieces together just so.
“She was nesting,” he said. “But I knew I couldn’t rush this door.” Somehow, the door was finished in time, and it is now the portal to their daughter’s world, carved with notches documenting her growth. Eventually, Vicco von Voss said, he wants every door in the 1,400-square-foot house to be unique and equally inventive - a one-of-a-kind work of craftsmanship, like a finely-detailed heirloom.
“This house is not any different than a piece of furniture,” he said. “It’s just a
different scale.”