EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

The Ranch House Rides Again

We’re excited to debut our new FLEXAHOUSE plan, commissioned from San Francisco architect Nick Noyes and inspired by his recent AIA-Sunset Western Home Award-winning ranch house in Healdsburg, California, shown below, photographed by Cesar Rubio.

Below is a view of our  FLEXAHOUSE Great Room looking in the same direction, from the kitchen to the  living room.

Note how Nick kept the vaulted ceiling, window wall, French doors, and general feeling of airiness, while adding  a brand new feature we call the “Flexawall,” which provides storage and display along one side of the Great Room. It’s a flexible feature because it can open toward the Great Room and to the entry hall behind it.

FLEXAHOUSE is  a “kit-of-parts plan”  because the key elements — Great Room, Master Suite, Bedroom and Bath Unit, Guest Suite, Garage, Flexawall, Entry, and Trellis — combine to form three different layouts (I-shape, L-shape, and T-shape) to suit various lot configurations.

Start with the core of  the plan, which is the Great Room,

Then add the Master Suite,

Bedroom-Bath Unit,

and Garage

and you have the basic house. Here’s the T-shape example in elevation (for a wider lot),

and plan.

FLEXAHOUSE comes in 3- and 4-bedroom variations for a total of 6 different plans, ranging from 2,254 sq. ft. to 2,580 sq. ft. You can change the orientation of the garage to enter from either side, instead of the front. Exterior siding options include stucco, shingle, and board-and-batten.

Roof options are standing seam metal and composition shingle. The plan starts at $2,500. It has been engineered for seismic, snow, and hurricane zones.

“The idea,” says architect Nick Noyes, shown above, “is to create a design that’s almost a custom home plan because of the many options you can select. All sites are different and require different design responses. The opportunity with FLEXAHOUSE was to create a design that was flexible enough — with three different arrangements of the basic elements — to conform to varying site conditions such as local solar orientation, views, and other particularities. By adding more bedrooms, changing the orientation of the garage, or choosing siding and roofing options you can create still more variations.” It’s also an eco-friendly house: Nick designed it on a 16-inch grid for maximum construction efficiency and minimum construction waste.

I think it’s an ingenious contemporary reinvention of the ranch house, bringing easy indoor-outdoor living ideas from the past into the 21st century. The design is informal and elegant at the same time, like Nick’s Healdsburg house,

with it’s warmly inviting kitchen at one end of the Great Room (Cesar Rubio photo), which was our muse.  Let’s wrap a FLEXAHOUSE up for you!