I am excited to introduce house plans by Andrus Elm and Oliver Kangro of Concept Home, a company from Estonia on the Gulf of Finland with wide engineering, architecture, and development experience across Southern Europe and Scandinavia. Concept Home is the newest member of our International Exclusive Studio, which also includes plans by architects from Australia, Brazil, India, Ireland , and Italy. I’m drawn to Concept Home’s open and adaptable layouts, wide range of plan types, and warm contemporary style. Plan 537-9, for

example, which has 1,487 sq. ft., would work well for a ski chalet or a country getaway, with its strong

indoor-outdoor connections (terraces on two sides) and upstairs balcony leading

to two bedrooms, which lets the upper level share views out the tall living room window wall. Plan 357-13, below, has 4 bedrooms, three baths in 2,300 sq. ft.

boasts a handsome extended hearth in the living area and a generous covered

dining terrace off the kitchen. With its shed roof, vertical board siding, and

window wall, Plan 537-17 recalls classic modern designs like the Sugar Bowl Ski

Lodge of 1939 designed by architect William Wurster (photo courtesy 2729

Hyperion.com) and a mid 1960s house like this one at Sea Ranch by Joseph Esherick (photo courtesy Sea Ranch Escape).The layout of Plan 537-17 is

carefully thought out with a multi-functional island — for cooking and dining –

separating the kitchen from the living area, a large storage closet near the kitchen, and terraces at front and rear on the ground floor and deck above. The aim of Concept Home is to design houses that are flexible, functional, full of

natural light (this is Plan 537-4), and inexpensive to build. They feel natural and warm. And, according to Concept Home: “Most of our houses can be adjusted to passive house principles in a great variety of geographical locations. We believe that a modern house must be energy-efficient.” Bravo.

So welcome home, Andrus and Oliver — or should I say it in Estonian: Tere tulemast kodu!!

Our inventory of eco-friendly plans got a boost with the arrival of our newest design, Plan 525-1, which is by architect Karl Smith, the latest member of our Exclusive Studio. His idea was to design an 1,800 sq. ft. three-story, sod-roofed home to fit a tight lot.

The ground floor contains a covered patio, mud room, and guest suite-office;

the  living-dining area and kitchen are on the middle level,and the master bedroom suite is at the top. 

You can see how carefully thought each floor is, from the wood stove in the ground floor guest room to the walk-in pantry by the kitchen and the master closet with its own island on the top floor. A very elegant and urbane design. According to Karl the sod roof sits over a waterproof membrane of Bituthene (manufactured by Grace Company) and “provides an R-48 U value, and can be supplemented with a layer of rigid insulation in the roof sandwich.  The walls are minimum R-16, but that can also be increased, and with insulated glass in the windows, it will more than accomplish most environmental concerns.” I think his roof watering system is clever: it uses reclaimed water pumped from cisterns  below French drains.

Another only-at-Houseplans.com sod roof design — this one by Werner Field Architects, Plan 491-5 — takes an opposite tack and is long and low and the living is all on one level.

The green roof even extends over the carport. The plan is simplicity itself — with a bedroom at each end of the long bar-shape –

and blurs the distinction between the natural and the man-made as well as between inside and outside.

A dusk view adds to the  green roof although, as the architects explain, the design can work without this feature. We’ll keep adding more “green conception” plans — so instead of letting the grass grow under your feet, why let it grow over your roof!

One of the great pleasures of my job is meeting and working with talented architects from around the world who are interested in making high quality home design available to everyone. And so I am especially excited to present house plans by Irish architect Frank McGahon who is the newest member of our Exclusive Studio.

His work is both regionally expressive in the use of traditional  features like stone walls and courtyard compounds, and very contemporary in the manipulation of open plans and strong indoor-outdoor connections, as you can see in a view of the living room window wall opening to the patio in Plan 520-6, above. Here’s a another view.

Each of the three key functional spaces — kitchen/dining area, living room/entry, bedroom wing –  is expressed as an independent gable.

One wing angles slightly away from the next to frame different views and allow a measure of privacy for each. The wide entrance hall binds them while bending them into a curve, like a bow-string pulled taut. Open the front door and you are effectively releasing the arrow and launching your gaze into the vistas ahead. Ingenious!

Frank (here he is) knows something about tradition. He has followed his great grandfather, grandfather, and father into practicing architecture in the town of Dundalk, equidistant between Dublin and Belfast. After graduating from the School of Architecture, University College Dublin in 1989 he worked in London and Dublin before returning to work for his father in Dundalk in 1992, eventually taking over the practice and establishing McGahon Architects in 2001. But he’s also a modernist as you can tell by the elegant abstraction of Plan 520-4, below.

 It’s an elemental nature-viewing pavilion; the ultimate getaway.

See how the living/dining area and master bedroom flank the flame-red kitchen/storage/plumbing core. It’s a modernist reduction to essentials and draws inspiration from great twentieth century architectural icons like Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and more recently the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura (winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize) such as his house in Cascais, Portugal, shown below.

(This image courtesy the Pritzker Prize website.) I like how Souto de Moura’s house and pool are essentially “the same only different:” one a rectangular solid, suspended; the other a rectangular liquid, grounded. The firm of Shift architecture urbanism in Rotterdam has designed a faculty club for Tilburg University that uses the same shape but with different solids and voids, as shown below.

(image courtesy Dezeen Design Magazine). Indeed, there’s a fine essay waiting to be written about how modern architects have adapted the simple flat box in a thousand different ways, proving yet again that limitation breeds invention…

But Frank McGahon has additional arrows in his architectural quiver. One that’s particularly compelling is his use of courtyards and patios to make the house and lot extensions of each other while forming a compound, as he does in Plan 520-9, below.

The entire lot is divided into a series of rooms, some roofed and some not, with a home office in a separate structure at one end. In effect, the house is surrounded by courtyards. In Plan 520-7, it’s the other way around.

Here the courtyard is at the center and the house is a square doughnut in plan — like an atrium house in Pompeii. Again a major space like the kitchen/dining area connects to the outdoors in a dramatic way,

in this case via one of Frank McGahon’s signature glass gables. Compounds aren’t the only way to go however. His L-shaped house in Blackrock, Plan 520-8, is really an L-inside a rectangle.

Conceptually, then, whether surrounded by outdoor rooms or surrounding them, house = lot. This is the architectural imagination at work. Welcome to the neighborhood, Frank!

Some architects are always looking, and adapting what they see for their designs. Take David Weingarten and Lucia Howard of Ace Architects, for example. Their “Rancho Diablo” is an extraordinary architectural travelogue or “ride” that incorporates references to the Wild West desert of Wile E. Coyote, Italy, and early Bay Region design history.  Here are some images of the house.

The marvelous ovoid openings that appear in all three images (photographs courtesy Ace Architects) are adaptations of a Gothicized window treatment developed by Berkeley, California architect Bernard Maybeck for some of his early 20th century houses like the one shown below.

You can see that David and Lucia enjoy their work! But there’s more. Rancho Diablo also houses one of the largest collections of miniature or souvenir buildings in the world (it may well be the largest), amassed by David Weingarten and Margaret Majua. These include coin banks, pencil sharpeners, lamps, thermometers, and salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of landmarks from across the planet — they are often in exhibitions at SFO, museums, and elsewhere.

At Rancho Diablo there is a special gallery that holds a selection of the miniatures. Here you can tour the Eiffel Tower and the Egyptian pyramids without leaving home.

As the architects themselves might say, their work, like their collecting, is “vigorously eclectic.”

Not to be outdone completely, Houseplans.com has a growing collection of plans that exhibit a travel-history (travelicity?!) quality, which seems especially appropriate for summer.We have a version of the White House, for example, Plan 119-189.

Or if the burden of history is a bit heavy, why not lighten the load with a lighthouse, Plan 64-204.

You can see more such designs in our Unique and Unusual House Plans Collection.

Another friend of mine, artist Keith Wilson, never stops working when he’s on a holiday trip. His eye is architectural and whimsical at the same time: color and shape recombine in almost childlike ways, recalling the work of Paul Klee. His drawn buildings are recognizable but novel, like the vibrant sketch of St. Peters in Rome, shown below.

Just a few elements – curves, columns, pediment, dome – capture an impression of the landmark, while the bright colors and grid change it into something new. I think this process of “capture/change” is what many people go through as they visit a new place. Vacations are the times to refresh your image banks! So use your camera or I-phone to record your surroundings — you may see ideas you can adapt for your new home. Bright colors for an accent wall? Or maybe you’ll see a Gothic window you can reinterpret. I think this is what summer is all about — looking for ideas wherever your travels may take you.

It’s incredible to think that the most famous modern house in America — Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pennsylvania by Frank Lloyd Wright — turns 75 this year. I have toured it twice and it still looks contemporary and forward-thinking today. Thanks to Fallingwater (Rizzoli 2011) a new book of essays and sumptuous photographs edited by Fallingwater’s director, Lynda Waggoner, you can take an engrossing armchair tour. Those cantilevered decks still inspire — though they have been strengthened over the years — but after three quarters of a century suspended over a waterfall anyone could use a little help!  In fact, the chapter by the engineer Robert Silman, who did the artful and seamless strengthening job with post-tensioned concrete (he was part of the team that helped first responders to the World Trade Center analyze the stability of surrounding structures)  is especially fascinating reading. (Wright photo courtesy Water history.org) Silman even quotes a letter from Frank to his client Edgar Kaufman, who had hired an engineer to second guess Wright’s own calculations: “You seem not to know how to treat a decent one [architect]. I have put so much more into this house than you or any other client has a right to expect that if I haven’t your confidence — to hell with the whole thing.” Don’t mess with Texas, er Taliesin! Spring is a glorious time to tour the house — to do so contact the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

Spring Plan Sale and More Siting Advice

Though Fallingwater raises residential architecture to a high art, the principle of uniting structure and site should be an important part of every home design. One of the common refrains of this blog — and of Houseplans.com — is that every ready-made house plan should suit its lot or be adapted to it. Here’s an example, from our Spring Sale of Selected  Exclusive Plans (up to 40% off through May 31, 2011): the two-story Garage/Studio Plan 498-3 by architect Matthew Coates, which could easily become an in-law suite or backyard cottage. It’s a simple gabled box with a shed dormer but see how it is dug about four feet into the hill on the entry side so the car has a level pad. As you walk around it you see how each side responds to a different context, from the far side, where it’s not dug into the slope and it’s possible to have a straight path back to the entrance for the studio stairs. At the rear you can see how the stair takes advantage of the corner to bring  light not only to the stair itself but also down to the garage and up to the studio. The shed dormer takes it from there offering a private view into the forest. Our Flexahouse Plans 445-1 through 6, (also on sale through the end of May), make a similar point. Architect Nick Noyes designed the Flexahouse , which is a type of ranch house, in three configurations so it can suit different lot conditions, from long and narrow to short and wide. (Click Spring Sale Plans to see all our exclusive home plans on sale this month.)

Orientation to the sun is key; in the northern hemisphere a southern exposure is usually best for warmth in winter and cool breezes in summer; west-facing glass needs to compensate for hot afternoon sun with insulation or shading of some sort. A northern exposure offers cooler indirect light and is the classic orientation for an artist’s space. A breakfast area often faces east to catch the morning sun. In a way you can think of the house as a sundial: analyze each room — where will the sun be coming from when you think you’ll be occupying it most often? It’s easy to modify a plan by replacing a window with a door for more convenient outdoor access, say, or by adding a window to capture a view. And our Modification Department is happy to help! A good house plan is only good if it takes advantage of its site.