Inside the Dickerman Residence, a Low-Slung Sullivan County Home by Richard Pedranti

Designed by architect Richard Pedranti, the Dickerman Residence in Sullivan County uses a simple shed form, natural materials, and high-performance strategies to create a home that settles easily into its wooded site.

When architect Richard Pedranti talks about the Dickerman Residence, a modernist home built in Narrowsburg in 2015, he returns again and again to a deceptively simple idea: don’t mess it up. Pedranti is talking about the landscape, of course—a sloping, wooded site in Sullivan County, threaded with boulders, meadow, a seasonal stream, and a lake just downhill—but he might just as well be talking about the architecture itself.

The Dickerman house is a study in restraint: a long, low structure gathered beneath a single shed roof, quietly settled into the land. It’s the kind of building that looks inevitable once it’s there, which is another way of saying that a great deal of thinking went into making it feel effortless.

The clients, Colin and Peter, were living in Lower Manhattan when they first approached Pedranti. A writer and a designer, respectively, they were looking for a weekend escape—somewhere restorative, somewhere green. Like so many of those stories, the pandemic turned that weekend house into a full-time residence. But the original impulse never really changed: They wanted a place where nature did most of the talking, and the house knew when to keep quiet.

A Path, Not a Driveway

Before there was a house, there was the land—and getting to it was no small matter. The property, roughly five acres, required a new access road, threaded through mature trees, boulders, and slopes. Pedranti brought in landscape architect and retired forester Ed Brannon, who worked closely with the clients to walk the site repeatedly, identifying what should be avoided as much as what should be highlighted.

That entry is marked by a boulder—one of the site’s defining features—which the house literally overlaps. The builder, sympathetic to Pedranti’s light-touch approach, carefully framed the structure around it. The rock becomes a stoop, a threshold, a reminder that the house arrived after the landscape and intends to behave accordingly.

Inside, Looking Out

Step inside, and the house opens toward its most compelling asset: the lake. In the main living space, Pedranti subtly pushes the geometry outward, creating corner windows that wrap the view into the room. The effect is panoramic without being theatrical, immersive without demanding attention.

Materials throughout are drawn directly from the site’s visual vocabulary. Stone, Douglas fir, and wood surfaces dominate, complemented by an exterior clad in a muted green-gray that blends easily into the surrounding forest.

There are moments of personality, too. The kitchen backsplash features a custom-made, hand-crafted tile in a specific blue-green color that Colin brought to one of the earliest meetings as a physical swatch. It’s a small detail, but emblematic of the way this house balances discipline with personal expression.

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