Category Archives: Regional design

Architects’ Own Houses and Regional Ideas

Posted on April 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Homework for Professionals

What houses do designers design for themselves? A fascinating exhibition at the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley titled “All Their Own” begins to answer this question by showcasing architects’ and landscape architects’ own homes in drawings and other documents. All the work on display is drawn from the extensive collections of the Environmental Design Archives. Here is  Earl Nisbet’s compelling rendering of a romantic modern stone and glass mountain cabin. He studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and you can see this in the strongly geometric house form, the characteristic fine-line drawing style, and the nature-derived color palette with the patch below the window wall that’s highlighted a favorite Wrightian shade of orange-red. This sort of presentation rendering is unusual because there is no need to”sell the client” when you are designing your own house. The preliminary sketch by William Wurster (one of the founders of the College) for his U-shaped weekend house at Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco, seems almost child-like: just a bare outline, a few scribbled dimensions and notations — like “SAND” for the courtyard. The house he actually built wasn’t very different — a kind of stable for people, with concrete floors, each bedroom opening directly to the sand courtyard though Dutch doors, and a main living/dining/cooking space — the very essence of simplicity. So in a way, the minimal drawing expressed the esthetic perfectly.

Often a designer’s own house becomes a kind of advertising for her or his work. This was especially true for folks like Frank Lloyd Wright, who never stopped adding to or tinkering with Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona; or ranch house popularizer Cliff May who took things to an extreme by designing five houses for himself and his family over the course of his career.

Some of the plans in the CED exhibit vividly show the designer’s mind at work. Here’s the first house that Jerry Veverka (who has a plan in our Exclusive Studio) designed for himself on a steep leftover lot in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Jerry documented his thought process. His notes on the yellow graph paper indicate he tried out several different schemes to analyze flat roofs vs. gables, and a central vs. an off-center garage. The upper 3-D drawing shows a later, more fully worked out elevation. See how the “full height sun porch” from the yellow trace has morphed into the big window on the colored sketch and how he has settled on gable roofs and an off-center garage. The cutaway view below shows how he has conceived of the house as a loft with the master bedroom overlooking the main living space so both rooms can share the big window wall. See the stair-stepping fireplace and the broad steps leading down to the living area from the dining space: in fact the drawing shows how the whole design is about taking advantage of stair forms and large windows to make such a steep site habitable: the architectural imagination at work!

Another image captured my attention –  a 3-D drawing by Charles Moore for his own house in Orinda. This image shows the concept: treat the small house as a series of four-poster pavilions under one roof, like nested boxes. The bigger four-poster was for living; the smaller for sleeping and bathing. The idea probably came from Moore’s time as a teaching assistant for Louis Kahn — Kahn’s Trenton Bathhouse, shown below in a model (courtesy Wikipedia and not in the CED exhibition) is a famous example of pavilion design. Moore made the idea his own by miniaturizing it and packing everything into a single volume: a sort of architectural wardrobe.

One of the most revealing items in the CED exhibit is this letter from Moore to landscape architect Lawrence Halprin while both were working on the plans for The Sea Ranch community on California’s North Coast. Note the hourly rate in 1965 that Moore charges for his own time: $4! So…What will you have: a decaf latte or the services of an eminent architect for an hour?! (I guess coffee then must have been about a nickel a cup…) Though we cannot match that rate at Houseplans.com we can be very reasonable; and we even offer the plans for historic Sea Ranch Cottages designed by Charles Moore’s partner Bill Turnbull. Hold the java and hire us!

Be Regional

One of my periodic rants is about regionalism in design — that is, the need for a connection to a place, culture, or time. Though I am a fan of Modernism in all its variations I also want to see a little regional relationship to help me know where I am. That’s partly why I’m so enamored of porches you can really live on — they allow outdoor living on balmy days and shelter from the weather on stormy days; they respond to the climate. Think of the houses along the Florida Panhandle, for example, like our Plan 443-10, with its expressive screen porches and sun shades over the windows. The outdoor spaces are designed to catch the breezes in a humid climate. To me it evokes a Florida style of building, while the interior layout is open and contemporary. Regionalism also has to do with materials — building traditions grew up around whatever materials were easiest to come by: bricks or concrete block in some places, wood in others. One of the exciting things about observing how home design is evolving is to see the ways modern and regional ideas can be combined. Look for more reporting on this topic. Welcome spring!

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Posted in architectural history, Architectural Innovation, Architectural Styles, contemporary home design, House plans, layouts, mid-century modern homes, modern architecture, Modern Houses, Porches, Regional design, Uncategorized

Home Design Diary

Posted on October 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Decision Time for Porch, Pump House, Tank

The story of our house building adventure (using Long House Plan 508-1 designed by architect Nicholas Lee) continues: we made some key decisions this week. You may remember that we were looking at where to place the water storage tank, and then it turned out we needed a small shed to house the pool equipment and the pump for the well.

Architect Nick Lee and builder Ryan Eames settled on the southwest corner of the lot, adjacent to the well itself, which seemed the most practical and cost-effective location.  I liked the suggestions from Facebook viewer Tobe that we should either bury the tank or use the pool as the storage system. Both excellent ideas — however, we had already purchased a tank that was designed for above- ground use only, and regulations in the area don’t allow using the pool for auxiliary water storage. You can see from the  view below that the tank and shed will dominate the view from the master bedroom and porch.

On the other hand they will help define an outdoor room near the pool. The current thought for the pump house, which will be 10- by 16-feet, is to make it the simplest sort of gabled structure. One idea — not yet agreed upon — is to cover one wall with a metal trellis system, like this one from Greenscreen

Covered with honeysuckle, for example, the shed could provide a leafy backdrop to the pool. I’ll let you know the final decision here.

Other decisions this week focused on the house-long porch or gallery. What about cross bracing for the porch roof, which engineering seemed to require. It might look like this.

That struck me as a little too Western frontier town-ish — like a movie set. Others seemed to agree. If we aimed for greater simplicity, then, what size posts? First thought was to use 4-by-4 steel posts, but they proved too expensive. Then 6-by-6 wood posts seemed appropriate for the scale of the house. However engineering required that there be nineteen posts, set at intervals of 9 feet, like this:

So many posts set quite close together began to make the porch look more like a cage, so after conferring once again with the engineer, architect Nick Lee looked at somewhat beefier 8-by-8 posts, shown below.

The simpler profile with 9 posts instead of 19 seemed much less cluttered. And it turns out that using fewer, though larger, posts is actually the less expensive way to go. That made the decision even easier. As Goldilocks might have said (actually she would have made a pretty good client): this version feels just right!  With regard to the roof we’ll save ca. $8000 by switching from metal to composition shingle. Done. We think we have already saved roughly $30,000 by switching to conventional wood frame construction (for the walls) from a form of structural insulated panels (SIPs). Also, we need to decide the character of  the exterior walls: to batten or not to batten? Stay tuned.

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Posted in Building Materials, contemporary home design, Design Ideas and Inspiration, Home Products, House plans, layouts, Landscape Ideas, modern houses and house plans, Porches, Regional design, Uncategorized

House/Site Planning 101

Posted on October 15, 2010 | 6 Comments

Ranch House Diary:  The Lot As Chessboard

Guess what? Building a house is a complicated process. You’re constantly juggling design ideas, needs, essential functions, construction details, esthetics, and affordability. And remember one of my mantras, or what some might call my “daily rants” — house and lot/site should complete each other like any strong partnership. So the juggling process continues outdoors as well.  Why am I always surprised…Take today’s meeting at our ranch house construction site, for example. Architect Nicholas Lee’s plan carefully situates the house on a north-south axis to preserve as much of the lot for outdoor living as possible.

The driveway is at the left or north end. The site plan, unlike the house layout itself,  forces us to consider the functions of the sections of the site. The late great landscape architect Thomas Church always attempted to make his outdoor spaces compatible functionally with the rooms adjacent to them. And that’s what we want to do here — i.e. have a more public sitting and entertaining area off the Great Room beside the pool, and a more private area off the bedrooms. To refresh your memory, here’s the Long House plan again (508-1) showing the Great Room and the entrance off the porch beside the kitchen.

You can see in the plan below how we haven’t quite fixed the placement of the pool — moving it a few yards south would give more room for the outdoor entertaining area.

The big diagonal line at the left of the plan marks the required area for the septic system — in fact the septic system essentially determines where the house itself can go on this lot. A water storage tank is also required, along with a small pump house for the pool. These latter elements present new challenges and possibilities. Should the tank be at the front of the house as a kind of agricultural exclamation point to the front facade?

Or should it be close to the pump house, or somewhere else.

It turns out that for practicality sake, the tank needs to be near the well (we decided that today so the tank is not yet in the drawing) which is at the southwest corner of the lot. This  is where it also seems most logical for the pump house to go and provides the opportunity for a handsome architectural grouping marking the southern boundary of the garden. So in the end the lot is a kind of chessboard, or more precisely –  since budget is always involved — a game of Chutes & Ladders. Every move has a consequence affecting nearly every other decision.

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Posted in House plans, layouts, Landscape Ideas, modern houses and house plans, Porches, Regional design, Uncategorized

Case Study Ranch House

Posted on October 8, 2010 | 7 Comments

Farmhouse Modern

In the beginning was the lot.

Houseplans.com has decided to design and build a house on a rural half-acre site in Sonoma County about 25 minutes from our offices. This is how the lot looked today. The idea is to use our experience to demystify the building process and create a searchable construction journal that will be useful for anyone building a house.

A small existing cement block cabin was removed and architect Nicholas Lee — Houseplans.com’s very own Director of Design — developed a new plan called the Long House (508-1 ), which is now part of our Exclusive Plan Collection. Here it is.

Our criteria were that the plan had to be simple, functional, and affordable;  take advantage of its site; and have a sense of place — all within a three bedroom two bath weekend or vacation home for a family with two children. The somewhat narrow site runs north-south and the best view is west across a field to tree-covered hills, so Nick  ran a porch the length of western facade to frame the view and provide shelter from the strong afternoon sun.

Inspiration for the Long House came from  regional works like William Wurster’s Gregory farmhouse of 1928, shown below.  A brick-paved gallery runs along the entrance side.

(don’t worry, the bed frame gets a mattress in summer…). Recent ranch houses by the firm of Turnbull, Griffin, Haesloop were another important influence, especially their designs sporting porches that double as outdoor rooms, like this one.

The floor of the porch above is wood, while ours will be even simpler — concrete — as an extension of concrete floors throughout the house.

So…we have begun.

Stay tuned — I’ll talk about siting in a future post.

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Posted in architectural history, contemporary home design, Design Ideas and Inspiration, modern architecture, Regional design, Uncategorized

Architecture Books

Posted on December 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

Reading About Houses

With the many boxes of architecture books in our basement you could say that they’re helping to support our house, and with all the architecture books on our shelves you could also say that they’re helping to weigh it down. But at least it’s balanced — though some folks in my family could say we have reached a tipping point, literally. In any case, the obsession must be fed, so here’s a quick round-up of design books that have recently caught my eye — good for last minute gifts or your first reading list of the new year.

In the decades following World War II, a number of small communities across the country built modern, architect-designed houses, such as Snake Hill in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Six Moon Hill at Lexington in the same state. Living Modern, by Waverly Lowell (William Stout, publisher), chronicles the planning and building of such an enclave, called Greenwood Common, in the Berkeley Hills above the University of California campus in 1952.

It was developed by architect William Wurster, dean of Berkeley’s architecture school and later founder of the College of Environmental Design. His idea was to create a modern but regionally responsive, outdoor- and community-oriented neighborhood of houses by a diverse array of contemporary architects. (Full disclosure:  Wurster bought the land from my grandmother, who was very interested in modern architecture. My father used to tell us children about playing softball on what his family called “The Front Lot,” where eight houses now stand.) Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin designed the setting

including the common green facing a view of the Bay, and several of the individual gardens many years before he became famous for his city parks and water gardens around the country. The book vividly describes how clients and architects worked together to create very progressive living environments and includes conceptual sketches like this series by architect Donald Olsen,

which shows his interest in International Style geometries.

Casa Del Herrero, by Robert Sweeney (Rizzoli, publisher) is the story of a meticulously preserved Spanish Colonial Revival style house in Santa Barbara from the 1920s.

The name means house of the blacksmith and the edifice was built as the winter home for the family of St. Louis industrialist George Steedman, who enjoyed such hobbies as metal working (hence the name), wood working, and wine making.  For Steedman, according to Sweeney, “the shop was the holy land.” And his shop is indeed a marvel: the large room is densely packed and highly organized, with a vast array of tools occupying every surface.

He must have been a challenging client because he was constantly tinkering with every detail, from handrails to glassware. Spanish tile and wrought iron embellish every room.  You can visit the house by contacting the Casa Del Herrero Foundation.

Energy Free Homes for a Small Planet by Ann Edminster (Green Building Press) is an essential reference for anyone planning to build a home that uses as little energy as possible.

The author is an architect who helped develop our national green standards. She  explains what a net zero energy home is and shows how to develop your own plan for building such a house. The chapters address her concept of integrated design and how to minimize the energy your house needs, how to minimize the energy the house’s occupants need, and explain the options for appliances and fixtures. It’s a comprehensive guide to the greenest green.

What do architects read? I am always interested in this question because I want to know where architects get their design ideas. Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books by Jo Steffens (Yale University Press) looks at the book collections of ten contemporary New York-area architects.

Interviews with each architect explains what they read, and what their top ten books are. Robert Venturi’s seminal Complexity & Contradition in Modern Architecture — a book published in 1966 that championed the role of ambiguity in architectural form — is on several lists. There’s a voyeuristic aspect to the photos of sample shelves from each library…I confess I’m always looking for a copy of my book Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House! (must be the egg nog from our holiday party just now finished: it’s a truth serum). Billie Tsien and Tod Williams talk about their love of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica both for its lucid writing and for its tactile leather binding. Most of these libraries are organized by subject or architect so the juxtapositions aren’t unusual. But it’s an intriguing idea for a book and just makes me want to know more about the sources of architectural imagination.

These volumes can be found at the usual Internet sources but bookstores that specialize in design are especially rewarding places to browse, including Mrs. Dalloways Literary & Garden Arts, Builders Booksource, and William Stout Architectural Books. Happy reading and Happy holidays.

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Posted in architectural history, Architectural Styles, Books, contemporary home design, Green Design, mid-century modern homes, modern architecture, Modern Houses, Regional design, Uncategorized

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