Property of Architect Gray Taylor, Greenwich, Conn.

If building a new room or a new wing is clearly the best solution to your space problem, the next question is: where? The place where the addition would do you the most good may be the least promising for building, if, for instance, it is too near your property line, or the land is too steep, or even non-existent. But often ingenuity will solve such dilemmas, as architect Gray Taylor proved when he added a wing to the house he had designed for his own family on a wooded site beside a stream in Greenwich, Conn. 

Instead of expanding into the woods, he built straight out over the water. The addition of this delightful "air-borne" wing had been triggered by twenty years of putting up with a too-small master bedroom and lack of a separate dining room. Now the Taylors have a new living room (the old one has been turned into a dinig room), a new master bedroom (the former, now a guest room), a porch with a superb view, and a little kitchenette-bar. Beneath the wing, the stream ripples as before, full of trout that Mr. Taylor angles for through a fishing hole in his new living room heart.