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Capturing Serenity

Photo by Eric Moore

Kelly Davis has created a recognizable signature over three decades of work. His houses nestle into their sites with broad roofs and cantilevered decks and walkways that extend into the landscape. His light-filled interiors flow from space to space, yet are subtly differentiated by varying ceiling heights and thoughtfully placed windows, creating transitions from airy to intimate.

Finely wrought details—built-in bookcases, shelves, window seats, and couches—are assembled with Asian-inflected simplicity and puzzle-like precision. Structural details, including soffits and suspended panels, emphasize a restful horizontal plane. Natural, humble materials such as local limestone, rough-hewn timbers, richly colored woods, and simple concrete unite his creations with their surroundings.

Sound familiar? If the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright spring to mind, Davis would be pleased. “My work is Wrightian in spirit, and I say that with great pride,” he acknowledges.

Wright’s work inspired Davis from a very young age. On a gray winter day when he was 5 and visiting relatives in Buffalo, New York, his uncle took him on a drive. As the car sped along, his uncle pointed out a house designed by Wright, and Davis was struck by its power.

“Even to a 5-year old, its low, broad roof, its strong connection to the earth, the brooding spirit of it all—I had never seen anything quite like it,” Davis recalls. “It stood apart from all other houses, and the impression stuck.”

Davis’s architecture, however, differs significantly from Wright’s work in feeling, tone, and personality, points out Michaela Mahady, principal at SALA Architects, where Davis too is a principal. “Kelly’s work is very thoughtful and quiet as opposed to Wright’s buildings, where Wright’s presence as an architect is always dominant,” she explains. “Kelly’s work exudes a sense of serenity and calm and graciousness that’s really remarkable. You can feel the strong, gentle spirit behind the architecture, but it doesn’t intrude on you.”

While Davis’s portfolio indicates just how well he’s forged his own distinct aesthetic, his work also indicates a clear and consistent architectural style. “I have great admiration for residential architects that can go from one style to another, but I can’t do that and don’t want to do that,” he says. “I’d like to complete my career in architecture with a singular assemblage of work that’s stayed on a straight and narrow road.”

OF THE LAND

From his revelatory moment at age 5, Davis pursued a love of architecture, eagerly absorbing any materials he could on the subject. “Sometimes to the chagrin of my folks, pretty much every allowance in my youth was spent on plan books and magazines,” Davis says, “but they were a great way to begin to learn and understand design concepts and the language of reading and comprehending drawings.” He also credits his maternal grandfather, who lived in a prefab metal house with radiant floor heat and invested in Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house scheme, with planting the seeds of his design sensibility.

Davis earned his B.A. from the University of Minnesota’s architecture school in 1973, and then worked with Stillwater architects Mike McGuire and Clark Engler. His early experiences had a lasting influence.

“The second revelation in my architectural development was going through a house of Mike’s that was under construction,” Davis says. “It was the first time I experienced the power and fluidity of interior space. Mike is a master of that, and he was influenced by Wright as well.” For 10 years Davis was a partner in McGuire/Engler/Davis. He joined Mulfinger, Susanka & Mahady Architects—now SALA Architects—in 1993, where he is often sought out for his Prairie School style.

In 1979, Davis completed his first major project: his own house above the St. Croix River near his hometown of Stillwater. The 800-square-foot residence is a gem of rigorous simplicity with its slanted intersecting roofs, clerestory and artfully angled windows, built-in furniture, and humble palette of concrete block and redwood. Its design clearly reflects Davis’s interest in Wright and in the compact and elegant simplicity of Asian architecture.

Hardly a borrowed influence from Wright, Davis acquired his Asian aesthetic directly. A university class on Japanese, Chinese, and Indian architectural history opened his eyes to forms he had never before seen. As a college graduation present, his parents gave him an around-the-world airline ticket. He headed to Asia, where he has returned more than 20 times since.

Davis had already purchased the wooded St. Croix site and planned his house when he had an epiphany during a trip to Japan. “I was sitting in my tatami-matted room and thinking, ‘Where I am right now feels awfully good. Why do I need all that space?’ ”

He approached his new residence as “an experiment in honing a house down to its minimum.” The house is built into a south-facing hillside to maximize energy efficiency and hidden among the trees to minimize its profile—an expression of his core values. “I feel strongly about designing houses that respect nature and don’t try to outdo it,” he says. “The buildings that are the most successful are the ones half hidden by vegetation, so you have to squint to get a sense of where they are.”

He expanded on these early concepts with a 1,200-square-foot home completed in 2004, which Davis describes as “an updated variation on my own house.” Designed for a couple that lives primarily in a downtown Minneapolis loft, this rural retreat is nestled into its hilltop site near Lake Pepin, Wisconsin, and maintains a low-slung profile in keeping with the landscape’s open fields and the area’s farm-building vernacular.

Like Davis’s own house, the Lake Pepin retreat is built of concrete and wood, and features passive-solar orientation—glazed, south-facing windows welcome in the sun’s warmth and smaller openings on the north, east, and west, including clerestory windows, prevent heat loss in the winter but allow for natural ventilation. On one end of the roof (constructed of 10-inch-thick structural insulating panels) are photovoltaic cells that power radiant in-floor heat, supplemented by a wood-burning stove.

The interior includes Davis’s characteristic built-in bookshelves and intimate nooks, while an exposed truss system gives the house spaciousness and height. “It’s a small space, but it lives large and reads large,” Davis says.

Conversely, Davis’s largest house to date, a 13,000-square-foot Wisconsin residence completed in 1999, is filled with intimate areas defined with detailing. “We wanted a home big enough to entertain large groups,” says the homeowner. “Yet the reality is, we’re retired. Most of the time it’s just the two of us, and we needed livable spaces. Kelly did a magnificent job of accomplishing that.”

The house also inches across the contours of its bluff-top site as a series of low pavilions, so as to remain invisible from the Mississippi River below. “We didn’t want a great big building sitting on top of the bluff,” the homeowner says, “and that resonated with Kelly. The house really fits into the landscape.”

The horizontal planes in Davis’s designs create “peaceful lines [that] pull you through a house in an effortless way,” he explains. His use of varying ceiling and wall heights—“I hate dead-end corners because they abruptly stop the eye,” he explains—also allow the spaces to flow, even in more vertically oriented homes.

When a professional couple with a young child approached Davis seeking a modern house on a bluff above the St. Croix River in Stillwater, the architect chose a more vertical approach; the narrow lot came with severe river and street setbacks and height restrictions. Flat roofs retain a low profile and still allow for a third level, while a limestone tower that encloses a stairwell is topped by a crow’s nest with views of the river.

The house bends to follow the river, with large, horizontal bands of glass mimicking the contour and accentuating views.

“We put a lot of trust in Kelly to guide us, knowing he would look at every angle,” the homeowner says of a project that was an “emotional rollercoaster” due to the setbacks. “He came up with phenomenally creative ways of getting around those limitations and having the house be better in the end.”

TEAM SPIRIT

Davis is quick to acknowledge the people who have been instrumental in his success throughout the years. Since his days with McGuire/Engler/Davis, architect Tim Old and draftsman David Ferguson have worked with Davis on nearly all of his houses. He works hard to generate collegiality between his colleagues, his clients, and the contractors.

“I think of him as a consummate professional,” Mahady says. “Kelly has the gift of understanding things not only from an architectural perspective, but with great consideration for the team that’s formed by the builder and the client and the architect.”

For Davis, design is only “the tip of the iceberg”; a project’s success truly depends on communication from all parties. “It’s about constantly listening to what the client is telling you and being as rigorous as you possibly can in responding to them and to their needs,” he explains. “We’re orchestrating the largest investment people make in their lives. We’re dealing with their money and their dreams. So it’s imperative to make the experience as positive, rewarding, and trouble-free as possible.”

CAMILLE LEFEVRE IS A FREELANCE ARCHITECTURAL WRITER.