what a house should be - part four - it should be fun

Architecture is serious business.  Not only because architect's take themselves painfully serious, but because for folks who choose to go down the path of designing and building a custom house, it is probably the most money they will ever spend.  Tends to be a bit sobering.

A house is the daily landscape of your life.  You wake up to the walls and ceilings, floors and doors, that are your house.  You go to sleep under the stars, but under that ceiling as well.  Your house ought to be fun.  I don't mean funhouse fun, although that can be done.  I mean that as much as we often endeavor to create a house that is a safe refuge in the world, it should also be a place of joy.  We don't have a lot of tools in our belts to pull this off as architects - the sun streaming in a window, the smell of blooming trees wafting through a kitchen, the solid satisfaction of a door closing.

A house can be whimsical.  We have all seen those crazy structures, hobbled together by some singular, driven, local wacko made of license plates or aluminum cans or auto tires.  But that ephemeral whimsy can be made of simpler stuff - a series of little ledges that hold glistening snow or scuppers that cascade the occasional shower.

A house made of only those things would be tiresome in short.  But without these little moments, designed lightly, a house is not much more than a big motel room without even the magnificently awful painting over the bed.

what your house should be - part three - it should be beautiful

This may seem obvious, but often people think they have to compromise between function and beauty.  They do not.  Any architect should be able to design a project that lives comfortable in that slippery neighborhood of "beautiful".  It may be that this is hopefully subjective, but many aspects of a kind of architectural aesthetics are not so elusive.

For most folks, the beauty of a building is what it looks like.  For most architects it is also what the building is.  Part of what makes a building beautiful is that it makes sense - the building is something, not simply an assembly of windows and doors, roofs and foundations.  For Modernist architects, the exterior of the building should reflect the uses of the interior - a kind of truthful transparency.  For more traditional architects, the exterior facades of the building don't necessarily have anything to do with the interior function, but they should be artfully composed.  In all cases, a kind of thoughtfulness comes through.  We may not all like a given building, but any well-designed building should be able to be appreciated as such.

Your house should be beautiful.  Maybe not cover-of-magazine spectacular, but it should be what architects call "resolved".  The proportions of  door and window openings should relate to each other, the masses of the building should work together, the trim and casing should reinforce the proportions of the openings.  This is not to say that every window or door is the same size.  That kind of consistency is boring and frankly lazy.  But every house ought to have been on hard enough and long enough to bring the design to a place where the building is something, not a pastiche of different styles or a thoughtless amalgam of parts. None of this is limited by budget.  Ever.  These things are the basics that every architect should be able to bring to bear on a project.  If they can't or aren't for some reason, find another.

Sunshine Canyon A-frames

I am working on a remodel and addition to an odd A-frame hybrid house at the base of Sunshine Canyon, just west of Boulder.  The original house, built in 1964, was designed by architect Richard Brown.  Brown designed a number of these modified A-frame houses, mostly around Boulder, before he later took that form and proceeded to design churches.

After a little research, I found an article in the Sunday Denver Post from May 10th, 1964, that shows another of these houses.  The article goes on to talk about the number of steeply-sloping building sites that were being constructed on in Boulder.  In an interesting and prescient harbinger of a kind of critical regionalism, the article, written by Ellen Bull, goes on to say,

"...in nine cases out of ten, Boulder house designers actually are determined by the terrain."

"among the assets which builders and architects emphasize are the many days of sunshine, both summer and winter, the mountain views, and the fact that the mountains are close enough to use and enjoy."

"As each builder or architect finds the answers to these questions, in his own individual way, he develops a building not quite like any other anywhere.  The very difficulties he faces stimulate his imagination and ingenuity."

Well said.  In 1964.  It is a shame more of the subsequent building in and around Boulder did not heed that advice as we have more than our share of suburban McMansion boxes awkwardly grafted onto steep mountain sites.

(window mullions reflecting the shape of the pine trees beyond)

Our work will be removing some of the interesting features of the house, but as the whole house is in such bad shape, we will see what can be saved and what we can echo in the new construction.

what a house should be - part two - it should be affordable

Every project has a budget.  Whether it is a grand country house or a humble pop-top, the cost of the construction will always be stressed.  It should be. In the design process, there are loads of options that are considered and balanced.  But there is nothing quite so focused as the discipline brought to a project by an initial cost meeting with a contractor's exhaustive bid that is over budget.  But there is also usually no way for an architect to truly gauge the deep-seated priorities of a client until each of those priorities have a price tag.  A beautiful greenhouse is fantastic, but is it $50K fantastic?

It is extremely rare; rainbow-spotted unicorn-rare, that a client's budget exceeds their expectations.

There are a number of ways of establishing a budget and the realistic expectations to which it is linked:

An architect can do a cost estimate and design within that estimate.  Architect's are notoriously bad at this if they do it at all.  We want to please, we want to think we can fit 20 gallons in a ten-gallon hat.  The architect's budget can be based on a basic cost/square foot or can be more sophisticated breaking down the building into constituent parts and assigning differing costs to each.  The architect should do this before they sketch the first line or soon thereafter.  And at every phase of the project, the architect should update that cost estimate as more specificity is brought to bear on the project.

A builder can do a cost estimate. Homeowners can bring a builder on at the start of a project and the builder and architect can work hand-in-hand to simultaneously design the project and verify costs.  Many builders like this idea because they don't have to take the risk of competitively bidding a project.  However, most contractors are not very good at putting increasingly specific numbers to the rather vague initial sketches of an architect.  Very often builders say they need a complete set of drawings to work up an accurate price.  If that is the case then we might as well bid the project.  A contractor brought on during design should have enough experience and data from past projects to be able to make fair assumptions of cost.  Like the architect's estimate, the builder's budget will get increasing specific and hopefully more accurate as the design progresses.  No excuses for saying "we didn't have enough information" or "the architect added a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the early sketches".

An owner can do a cost estimate.  The quality of this estimate will vary greatly depending on the sources of info as well as the sophistication of the person assembling it.  Most dubious are the cost/sf numbers listed on the internet for new construction.  That information was free and probably not reflective of the region or date or style or ...  The owners budget is more like a vague idea of how important something on a project is to them.  Not absolutely everything in the dreams of the owner and architect will end up in the project.  The owner needs to know what is important to them and why and be able to communicate that to the team.

The best answer is:  all of the above.  The relationship between owner, architect and builder is best carried forth if everyone does their part to keep a discipline on the budget.  For an architect that means not adding in expensive details or assemblies without discussing them with all parties and knowing what everything on the job costs in relative terms.  For a builder that is not selling a client on an all-too-rosy scenario of an unrealistic budget to get a project only to have the reality of costs slam down at a later date.  For an owner, clearly communicating their desires as to materials and details early in the process is the best way to insure that costly change orders don't uncomfortably arrive during construction.

The building of a custom house is an exciting and thrilling prospect.  But there are too many stories of cost overruns and bottomless monetary pits.  Every project has a budget and every budget will be stressed.  If everyone does their part honestly and with diligence, that stress won't break the project.  "Affordable" is relative, different on every project, but we all ought to know it when we see it.

from the ashes - Sunshine Canyon house

We started construction today on a house up Sunshine Canyon to replace a home lost in the Fourmile fire.  Equipment is rolling.

Although the scars of the fire are all too evident, new life is sneaking back in between the County's air-dropped mulch.

Spring is indeed a time for renewal.

Stay tuned for updates over the next 12 months.

what your house should be - part one - it should work

This is the base competency for an architect - if you want a dining table that seats 10 (and you have made that clear to your architect) then the dining room ought to be able to hold that table.  Room-by-room, this is not difficult.  The homeowner describes what they want, in functional terms, the architect provides it.  Added up it all might not be in the budget, but simply designing a building to accommodate the functions of a house is usually pretty straight forward.

I am often slightly amazed when I visit a house to realize that the original design turned its back to an amazing mountain view or to get to a room you have to go down three steps and then up two.  These are also functional issues, though not as straight-forward as the room size problem.  I am currently working on a large renovation and addition that will put the living spaces at the best place to capture beautiful valley views, not just the garage like the old house.

Of course houses individually designed have individual quirks.  There are homeowners who see no need for a mudroom, or no need for doors to bathrooms for that matter.  Some of these functional oddities do show up in houses.  It has always been my practice to pursue these often strange ideas of clients while also pointing out to them that a  bedroom without doors may be seen as odd by some folks.

For as important as these functional issues are in the design of any building, they are not, and should not be, the sole catalyst for a project.  A perfectly functional house does not exist and the quest for such is of diminishing returns and at some point, diminishing spirit.  A house should work, but it should do so much more  ...

tune in to part two