GLUCK+ Suspends Understory House Between Forest Floor and Canopy

GLUCK+ has completed a 3,170-square-foot house that sits neither on the forest floor nor above the canopy, but in the midstory layer between them. The New York firm completed Understory House in 2024 on a long, gentle slope in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Tom Gluck and Peter L. Gluck led the project as lead architects. Here and Now Agency photographed it.

The name is literal, not poetic. According to the architects' own description, the house occupies "its precise position within the forest—neither rooted on the forest floor nor lifted above the canopy, but suspended in between, where the midstory becomes the primary experience." That in-between zone drives the design brief.

What does 'midstory' mean here?

Foresters divide woodland vertically into layers. The understory sits below the canopy; the midstory is the band between ground level and the treetops. GLUCK+ treats that band as the house's primary experience rather than a threshold. The firm's text frames the position as the project's organizing idea, with the architecture suspended within the forest's vertical strata rather than placed on top of the terrain.

The site is a rural second-growth forest, and the architects note it is "marked by miles of historic stone walls." Those walls carry the memory of the land—evidence of earlier agricultural use now overtaken by returning woodland. The architects state that Understory House "responds directly to the character and memory of the land."

What does this change for the site?

In practical terms, the design makes the slope a partner instead of an obstacle. The building follows the long, gentle incline rather than flattening it, and its position in the midstory means the inhabitants' daily view is the forest's middle layer, not a cleared lawn or a distant ridge. For a 3,170-square-foot program, that choice defines every window line and threshold. The project demonstrates GLUCK+'s broader method: deriving a house's identity from a precise reading of its site conditions—in this case, elevation within the forest and the traces left by past land use.

Understory House joins GLUCK+'s body of context-driven residential work. Completed in 2024 and set among reclaimed farmland stone walls in the Catskills, it shows how a strictly site-derived concept can carry a full-scale house; the firm's next test will be whether this suspended-in-the-forest model shapes its future commissions on similarly sloped, wooded sites.