The Schilling Residence, Indianapolis, IN

Type: Custom Single Family Residence
Role: Architect of Record - Beyond Architecture
Status: Built

The most immediate thing about the Schilling Residence is the color. A field of chartreuse rainscreen panels wraps the primary volume in a tone that shifts against the seasons — vivid against gray skies, almost naturalistic against late summer foliage — and the choice signals the project's broader ambition: a house designed to engage its landscape rather than recede from it. Two volumes in dialogue organize the program: a darker upper mass clad in charcoal and warm wood, crowned with a low shed roof, and the green lower box it counterweights. Between them, a full-height curtain wall of glass connects the two — transparent from outside, luminous from within.

The glass connector does more than link levels. It makes the site visible from within the house at every pass through the building, the terraced hillside framing views that change with time of day and season. Movement through the house becomes movement through the landscape. The material palette reinforces this: the warmth of horizontal wood boards at the base transitions to the industrial clarity of the green panels above, the glass spine holding the two in productive tension.

The outdoor sequence is as carefully resolved as the interior. A broad wood deck steps out from the main living level toward a circular fire feature set into the grade, landscape and architecture working as a continuous composition. A pergola extends the transition zone between inside and out. The result is a house that knows exactly what it wants to be — a specific thing on a specific site, built for a client who understood the difference between a house placed on land and one designed for it.