“I got this land as a kind of Covid baby,” says artist Miranda Fengyuan Zhang of her 20-acre homestead in Germantown, New York. At the time, Zhang and her father, Weijun Sun, were social-distancing together in her New York City apartment while dreaming of a house in nature. Spending weekends upstate, hopping back-and-forth across the Hudson River to look at properties, the pair found this one. With a natural slope and pond, it was “great for Chinese feng shui,” says Zhang, a Shanghai native who creates her work with textiles. With forest, farmland, and some transitionary fields in between, it also felt practical enough to build a live-work retreat.

Zhang’s biggest goal for the house was a sunlight-filled studio where she could rekindle her ceramics practice and explore larger-scale sculpture. For the artist, daily life and work are intertwined, so the home also needed a second bedroom to host her parents on their frequent visits to the United States. (Zhang’s mother, Lan Xue, works full-time in China, while her retired father goes back and forth, acting as Zhang’s studio assistant when he is in town.) Hiring an architect well-versed in designing such flexible environments for creatives became essential. Thankfully, Zhang had met Koray Duman, of New York– and Istanbul-based architecture firm Büro Koray Duman, through her former gallerist, Candice Madey.

Duman helped select a site between the farmland and forest and designed a 2,500-square-foot, two-bedroom home that could capture views of both. Its architectural form is rooted in gabled barn vernacular, which the architect “extruded and extended to get northern light into the studio,” he explains, while its materials—white-painted concrete and black-stained cedar shingles—reference traditional architecture from China’s Huizhou province, which struck Zhang when she visited prior to this design project.

Emphasizing an intuitive relationship between the interior and exterior, Duman designed a farm-facing deck shared between the living room and studio. Up the staircase with a built-in bespoke bookcase, Zhang’s bedroom seemingly floats within the tree canopy and enjoys its own private terrace. Underneath, the garage and storage space are nestled into a hillside, allowing these non-climate-controlled spaces to take advantage of the earth’s natural heating and cooling. Duman employed other passive design strategies throughout the home to assure its efficiency, including a renewable geothermal energy system, air-sealing the envelope and installing high-performance pocket doors, and using fans in the living room to encourage cross ventilation through upstairs and downstairs windows.