Clark and Menefee Architects

Clark and Menefee Architects

The Reid House was designed by W.G. Clark and Charles Menefee and built in John’s Island, SC in 1986. Menefee and Clark designed primarily in the American South. Clark and Menefee are known for their “tripartite vertical organization.” The base level normally consists of secondary bedroom(s)/studio spaces and services. The First floor is a “piano nobile of principal rooms with a double-height living space.” The attic level usually consists of the master bedroom and bath. The Reid House is set up in this fashion. The house is located in a modest setting, surrounded by house trailers and cheaply built houses. The image of the house was “derived from vernacular farm buildings as well as from more formal Palladian structures.” One author described the setting as “John’s Island, a peaceful landscape where truck farmers tend tomato fields carved out of scrub-pine and dwarf-cedar forests, and where the front yards of shacks are littered with junked cars, rusting agricultural machinery, and other decaying impedimenta of the Industrial Revolution.” The house is a three-story tower with two components. The first is a 20 ft. sq. section made of concrete block, housing the living and bedrooms, referred to as the “served space(s).” The second part, referred to as the “serving space(s),” is a wood-frame shed that holds the kitchen and the bathrooms. These two components are “joined at the fireplace and chimney, around which the stair winds.”

The materials used for the house are inexpensive, in keeping with the surrounding structures. One section is made of concrete blocks, exposed on the inside and covered with waterproofing paint on the outside. The other part of the house is “sheathed in plywood and battens and its roof is covered in asphalt shingle.” The floors are painted pine, the interior partitions, painted plywood. The total cost of the house was $102,000, only $2,000 over the budget that the Reids had set. They wanted the house built because they wanted to move their two small children out of a trailer home, and they wanted to have a larger space in which they could manage their 120-acre horse farm. The total area of the house is only 1600 sq. ft. One author noted that the house “[reconciles] lofty aspirations and modest means.”

W.G.