Discover spaces designed for modern living
The New World is the seventh community from Lantern & Co. — a small studio of architects, builders and gardeners who have spent twenty-two years making a single, stubborn argument: that places are worth taking time over.
Lantern & Co. began in 2004 above a hardware store in the old village. Two architects, one apprentice, and a single oak table that's still in the studio today — covered now in tracing paper and the rings of too many coffees.
We turned down the obvious work and took the patient kind. A library annex. A boathouse. A pair of cottages set into a hillside that no one else wanted to build on. Each project taught us the same thing, more slowly each time: that good places aren't designed so much as uncovered.
We are still a small practice — by choice. Architects, project managers, carpenters, two landscape designers and a planner who keeps us honest. Everyone here has worked on every community we've ever built.
The New World is our largest project to date and the one we've taken the longest to start. The land has been in our care for six years; the master plan has been redrawn nine times. We think it was worth the wait.
Every material we choose has to look better in fifty years than it does today. Lime-washed brick. Solid oak. Standing-seam zinc. We pay for it now so the house doesn't.
We spend the first six months walking the land before we draw a line. Where does the light fall in February. Where does the wind come from. Which trees stay. Plans are a conversation with a place, not a template.
A 1,800-square-foot house can feel cramped or generous. The difference is ceiling heights, window placement, the way one room opens to another. We design rooms you want to sit in, not square footage.
A landscape designer is on every project from week one. Trees are placed before foundations are poured. The terrace, the courtyard, the front-door plantings — drawn together with the walls.
We turn down more work than we take. It's the only way the answer to "who designed this house?" stays the same as "who built it" — and the same as "who you'll call when something needs attention a year from now."
Plain pricing. No upgrade traps, no decorator's office, no list of options sixty pages deep. What's drawn is what's built, and what's quoted is what's paid.
Everyone you'll meet on the project — from the partner who signs the drawings to the carpenter who hangs your kitchen cabinets — works here, not for a subcontractor. The phone gets answered by a person who knows which house you live in.