In Pursuit of the Perfect Little House

I’m always looking for contemporary plans with a sense of history; that is, deft designs for modern living that also have warmth and character. Well, Eureka!  I’m very excited about the regionally-inspired designs by Peter Brachvogel and Stella Carosso for their Perfect Little House Company. These plans are the newest additions to our Exclusive Studio Collection. For example, Plan 479-6,  the Tower Studio,

is actually a 262 square -foot  “micro cottage” with a small kitchen/living/sleeping area and bathroom

over a compact one car garage. I think it’s an ideal home office/retreat. With its simple square shape, tapering shingled walls, pyramid roof, and band of windows at the top it recalls early 20th century forest fire lookouts across the rural West, from Tumac Mountain Lookout

near Washington’s Mt. Ranier (Bob Baldwin photo, above) to

California’s  Gardner Lookout on Mt. Tamalpais (courtesy California State Parks). What could be more fitting for a writer’s retreat than a lookout, anyway –  isn’t that right, Virginia Woolf?  I’ll take it!

Classic early 20th century cottages,  bungalows, and farmhouses — which were themselves usually built from stock plans — are important reference points for Peter and Stella. Their 780 square-foot Willow, Plan 479-9,

wraps a generous porch around a compact 1 bedroom 1.5 bath layout to make the house feel larger than it is. A starter home with architectural character — suitable for an infill lot in an older neighborhood or as a mountain or lakeside cabin — this plan

could easily be expanded at the stairway as the family grows and budgets allow. Upstairs,  windows on all four sides

flood the bedroom and bathroom with daylight. Now compare this modern design to the 1908 Wietzel House from Tukwila, WA, shown below,

(photo courtesy Nickel Bros. House Moving). The old bracketed eaves, L-shaped porch, and big gable (not necessarily the weedy front yard) are signature features of many old cottages and farmhouses.  Add a contemporary looking standing seam metal roof and crisp shingled corners and some color — not to mention a new open floor plan — and there you are: another Perfect Little House.  Or compare the Weitzel house to The Cove, Plan 479-2 –  shown below.

It’s even closer in appearance — as if the older house has simply been remodeled. In the  new plan

the garage is on an alley at the rear.

On a somewhat larger scale, the Perfect Little House Company’s 1,914 square-foot, 3 bedroom 2.5 bath Kingfisher, Plan 479-4

offers larger gathering spaces and cozy nooks for reading and relaxing,

and on the second floor each bedroom is designed as a large window bay

for views across the treetops. Note the free-flowing circulation pattern — you can walk through the bathroom to the closet and back through the master bedroom — which adds a sense of spaciousness.

The trellis, shed dormers, and simple gable (shown above in the rear elevation of Plan 474-4) echo features of early Craftsman style houses, like this example

in Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman magazine (courtesy Arts and Crafts Homes magazine).

Peter and Stella earned their architecture degrees from the University of Michigan and recently founded the Perfect Little House Company as an offshoot of their firm, BC & J Architects. Peter has extensive town planning experience with emphasis on project management and building technology, and teaches architecture at the University of Washington. Their Cottages on the Green at Roche Harbor,

shown here, create a strong sense of place: it’s a new community that feels as though it has always been there. Welcome to our neighborhood, Peter and Stella!

Thinking Big By Starting Small

I met up with a developer friend at the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting and Expo in San Francisco this week (more about this event in a later post), and he said he was looking for what he called “Micro Cottages.” It made me think about plans that might start small and grow over time when circumstances and budgets allow — which seems a practical approach to home building in the current economy. So of course I looked through our inventory and created a collection of plans that are 1,000 square feet and under. For example, Plan 466-1

shown here, is 400 square feet

and is basically just one and a half rooms: a studio with a kitchen alcove and an enclosed bathroom. The front covered patio is an outdoor room for use in good weather. I can see adding onto this plan in various ways, such as turning the patio into an entry hall with added bedrooms and bathrooms opening off it.

Or take one of Bill Turnbull’s Sea Ranch Cottages (mentioned in an earlier posting), like Plan 447-1,

somewhat grander at 650 square feet. Again, the porch is an important expander in good weather.

A simple way to enlarge this plan would be to add more bedrooms and bathrooms off the living room and turn part of the front porch into a glazed hallway leading to them. Then the main living space could take over the original sleeping area.

Plan 471-1, below, is a 500 square-foot  module.

Designers Sarah Ascolese and Misty Weaver designed it to be a kind of multiplier.

Add up (literally!) — to 1,000 square feet — and you have two stacked modules, like Plan 471-3:

with sleeping area now on the second floor. Or expand to the side as in Plan 471-2

and you have 1,000 square feet in a horizontal configuration. The space between could be glazed to become an entrance hall. For more “Start Small” home ideas see our Micro Cottage Collection. Each could grow up to be a larger home someday.

Hitting Home

The approaching World Series makes me think about connections between baseball and contemporary home design. Themed decor is an obvious overlap and a brief web search produces a wide array of examples. This novel wall clock by Pachi Paradice from Squidoo

uses baseballs for numbers, suggesting new ways of telling time, like “quarter-after first base” (4:15) or “half-past home” (6:30). I think the  hands should be centered on the pitcher’s mound, however, not second base, because time and the game really begin with every pitch. Baseball wall murals

like this 9- by 15-foot example from Classic Wallcoverings, Inc., might suit a media or family room. (Bring out the garlic fries!) Or what about a baseball bat lamp

made out of a recycled metal slugger from Rerun Productions. It’s an odd idea but the tapered shape seems to work rather well. And naturally every front doormat

is really home base. The one shown above is from Uncommon Goods.

Interestingly, the baseball diamond makes a useful house plan diagram. For example, if I rotate Plan 48-415 slightly,

home base becomes the front entry; first base: bedroom 2; second: the master suite; and third: the kitchen. The dining area makes a good shortstop — for a short stack? — and the great room is a natural infield. Of course the back yard becomes the outfield and maybe the garage is the dugout. (You can’t do this with football.) The point is that a simple way of organizing a home is to think of it as a malleable baseball diamond. The tricky part is adjusting the space between the major rooms, er bases. You can borrow space but there’s no stealing.

Teamwork

Baseball has other connections to home design. My wife and I were in Buenos Aires earlier this year, visiting our daughter on her semester abroad. She had a room in the elegant early 20th century house of a remarkable woman named Diana who had raised three children there after her husband suddenly died. A plant-filled front hall, high ceilings — some a little crumbly and patched but full of character and style — welcoming dining and living rooms, and a roof deck were key features. Diana spoke very movingly of the house as “my partner in raising the children.” The roof deck was especially important as a protected place for them to play in that particularly dense section of the city. In other words, like a dependable catcher, a good house is a team player, working with you as life throws new challenges, allowing you to live not just more comfortably, but more fully.

Outfields of Dreams

The roof deck-as-team-player is worth considering for houses on tight lots with little yard space. The deck can be at the top of the house

as in Gregory La Vardera’s Cube House, Plan 431-8, or to one side

shown here over the carport in Plan 472-7, or

above a detached garage as Plan 64-195 shows. In all of these cases you just have to be sure your decking is over a gently sloped, well drained, and permanently sealed (often with an elastomeric membrane) roof.

Another way to to make sure your chosen plan is a team player is to customize it by building in a little flexibility; for example, by making sure there’s a ground floor bedroom and bath for when stairs become a problem. A good house plan can accommodate the seventh inning stretch.

Kitchen Table or Kitchen Island?

Before the kitchen island, geologically speaking, came the kitchen table. It’s still a viable option for many homes and is often part of a “country kitchen.”  As we saw in a previous post, Julia Child’s 14- by 20-foot kitchen was organized around one that doubled as a work surface. Table choices are many, from an Aaltoesque contemporary birch veneer table

like the Vika Grevska/Vika Oleby by IKEA, to a stainless steel restaurant work table

from Worktable World, to an art and science classroom table

with adjustable legs (to vary the height as needed) from CSN Supply.com, to a wheeled stainless steel example

from Design Within Reach, to a small chopping block

table like the Cherry Cucina Laforza (party of one!) from John Boos & Co. Circular tables tend to require a little more room. You can also create your own table from prefabricated legs and tops available from companies like Tablelegs.com and IKEA.

Island Time

What if you prefer island living? That is, a table that’s built-in. The classic layout of Plan 23-587,

uses the island for food preparation, informal eating,

and storage — with room for cookbooks. (Note that the orientation of the island has been changed in the built example.) In Plan431-1 (below)

architect Greg La Vardera uses a smaller food prep island and a round table.

In both cases the island separates the work area from the more formal dining space; guests or family members can sit at the table or the far side of the island and chat with the cook without getting in the way. In Plan 469-1, the island is two-tiered

to make the separation between work and sitting area more emphatic; the shaded L-shaped tier, which is raised several inches above the work surface, functions as the breakfast bar and hides kitchen clutter from the more formal dining area.

But really, the design possibilities are endless,

as this collage from Trendir shows. So, what island is calling you?

Power to the Place

A home is a kind of signpost

indicating where you are and sometimes where you’ve been and where you’re going (image courtesy Will Ockenden,  Flickr). In the most elemental sense, as in the historic outline of Ben Franklin’s house in Phildelphia created by Venturi Scott-Brown Architects,

which functions as a frame for history, a house is the place — and everything through and around it (image courtesy imcorker2 at Flickr).

Our customers build in many geographic locations,

as this North American map shows. At Houseplans.com we think each plan should be adapted to individual needs and the site (that’s what our Customizer Tool is for) so why not go a step farther and make sure each plan says something about its location. Usually this means giving a nod to the climate. In the hot bright desert Southwest, for example, deep shade is important, while in the rainy and overcast Northwest maximizing light is key. Historically the geography, climate, and available materials, tools, and building techniques all played a role in the development of architectural styles.

Though it’s now possible to build almost anything anywhere, it seems logical to take customization cues from the site and the neighborhood as well as from larger architectural ideas about structure and space.  Look at this Rocky Mountain house

by Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects, whose firm designed our exclusive Sea Ranch Cottage plans.  Here’s a landscape view, for context:

Sited between the treeline and the meadow, the simple structures belong where they are.  The steep gabled profiles recall ranch buildings from the 19th century while the sheltered outdoor living room — complete with fireplace — is very contemporary. The house celebrates its setting,

by becoming a nature viewing platform and re-imagining local building traditions while allowing for today’s living patterns.

So the lesson is: Look around when you build.

The setting and its building traditions can fire up a strong sense of place.