Home Design and Arch Books

There have been a plethora of new contemporary home design books published in the last 4 years and I think I own most of them. Yes, I do have over 30 home books now. Here are some of our favorites after a quick look through and judging by the number of pages we marked:

House: American Houses for the New Century, Cathy Lang Ho and Raul A. Barreneche
Cottages: The New Style, James Grayson Trulove; NOTE: some of the photography in this book is blurry and poor
Sustainable Homes: 26 Designs that Respect the Earth, James Grayson Trulove
Designing the Good Home, Dennis Wedlick
The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne

The last one is the best and the home on the cover is definitely inspiring ours. While all the titles and themes are toward green/sustainable homes (a good thing) we selected them because of the great modern architecture within.

First MAB Arch Meeting

Last Friday we were able to have our first official sitdown session with MAB since hiring them. Matt had already been working both in coming up with a few preliminary designs and also having gotten an estimate for our solar. The above design was the one that struck us as being quite close to some things we were thinking but with that extra touch to add more interesting elements. It really re-enforced for us the value of an architect and reiterated Matt's reputation as a real artist at architecture.

We really like this layout. We agreed to have one big room as the kitchen, dining, living area on the east side. This will have a lot of windows on the south for passive solar and a sizeable deck on the east for a nice indoor/outdoor space. The north side is where we'll have to do some work to have a balance of windows (since the nicest view is that way) but also insulate. Noting our budgetary constraints, Matt said we might have to consider some non-opening locally built windows to allow for glazing w/o having to pay the premium from the window making oligopy.

The most interesting concept here is the entry stairs, deck, and hallway. Since the house is sited on a slope and will either run with the slope or be in poles (like a treehouse) Matt came up with the idea of entering from below via a stairway that comes up into the middle of the deck (shown on the diagram). This would then look into a small hallway entry that would bridge the public and private spaces.

In addition to that, three modest sized bedrooms (one to be an office) and two baths. This all topped with a shed roof facing south with nice overhangs. A lot of exciting possibilities. This gives us a solid baseline to refine into specific room sizes and placement of utilities. One of the things we think we've lost because of budget constraints is the big fireplace. This will be replaced by a wood burning stove of which there are many nice contemporary models (including CPs favorite "sixties teardrop"). One benefit of this is that the main room won't be dominated by a fireplace and allow for 360 degree views.

Giants game

Girl getting her real american experience

CPs shell art

Sea farin' ahrt at the beach...now we're looking for driftwood. Jersey shore!

Some Clearing

Now that we officially have an architect and the siting project is starting we spent time on the site over Labor Day looking at site A. I broke out the chainsaw (which almost broke me) and we cleared out the small dead hemlock in the probable siting area to get a better feel for it. Besides removing these weedy (and potentially dangerous) trees we'd want to at minimum thin this area so it was walkable and it might end up where the house is so they'd be gone anyway.

We got a good indication that just taking down some of the hemlock let nice light through as we don't want to be in the dark and need it for the solar. We're basically going to try and keep all the hardwood and thin out most of the hemlock.

And yes, I should have taken a picture with my Treo.

Walking the Site

Matt and I walked the site last week. The good news is that he was excited about the property and its possibilities with multiple house sites. The less than good news: the road and bridge is going to be a big and expensive sub-project (not that we didn't know it). It won't be insurmountable but we probably eliminated site B which is deeper into the property because the road would have to be 400-600 ft and a small bridge over the stream. Road appears to cost about $20-30 a linear ft and that's w/o utilities which can run another $20 a linear ft for under ground (its $1500 for a pole every 300 ft which looks more likely). In addition, our little idea to bring the road down to a lower part of the stream and cross there wouldn't really save us much money because of the road costs and also we'd really impact the central part of the property where the view is because the grading (10%) would land the road right in the middle.

So we're back to focusing on site A and the big bridge. The good news is that we plotted out a rough possible road and that would only have to be about 200 ft after the bridge on relatively flat ground. And there looks like a natural place for a parking area/roundabout. We're still trying to keep the bridge/road/utilities to $50k but Matt thinks we'll be tight. Since we've formally hired him now engineers are going to be sent out in the next couple of weeks to assess the bridge possibilities. We like the idea of a pre-fab bridge where we put into concrete piers and they lay a bridge on top with a crane. Those firms will also do some of the engineering work for you.

Oh yea, and we looked at the house site pretty close to where CP and I had wanted it. This way we also leverage the already approved septic areas and can work the house into the slope for some extra intrigue. That process also starts soon.