Time to put pen to paper.
It was about March of 2017, roughly five months after we purchased the lots...a hectic time of our lives after the recent arrival of our second child, a daughter, in January, and along with all the other commitments of our 9-to-5 jobs. So, we had let our foot off the gas a bit, as you need to during times like that, just to keep your head above the water.
So now that we were settling into our life with this growing family we started to look around at our current digs and realized this just wasn't going to work for much longer. Our current home is the bottom unit of a duplex we renovated about 12 years ago now, and with two bedrooms, about 900 square feet of space, and a tiny backyard, it's simply inadequate in every sense of the word. So, we decided to dust off our sketchbooks and start laying out the vision for (hopefully) our next home.
This is perhaps the most fun time of any building project, whether personal or for a client...a time when you can play around with ideas, with materials, moving this room over here, sliding this door over here, adding a huge bank of windows right here, with no real consequences to budget or schedule (at least, not yet). For an architect, it's a dream come true to do this for your own home after doing it so many times for others; it was just an experimental, playful time.
The early sketches.
I thought it'd be fun to look at some of those initial sketches. Now, contrary to what many people think, most architects are not amazing artists. Shocking, right? Our sketches can look to the level of something your first grader might come home with, but in these rough sketches is often quite a bit of thought based upon experience. We might be reacting to the site, orienting the house this way and that until we get it just right. We might sketch a room there, then flip the paper around because it might work better over there, or better yet just scribble over things multiple times, massaging it until the layout feels "just right", arriving at what looks like a jumbled spaghetti of thoughts. But this is how it's usually done, and really how it should be. No matter how sophisticated the computer programs and AI become (at least yet), it's these quick and dirty sketches that really shape the project early on and allow the free flow of thoughts and ideas to happen.
I've recently gone back and looked at some of our initial sketches from back in early 2017. Most are amusing now to look at, with some of the designs likely way out of budget or unrealistic in some other fashion, but some do actually come close to what we eventually arrived at. They are nonetheless a snapshot of the process that was the design of our home, and one that is applicable to any house design. Below are several examples from the sketchbook and give you an idea of what goes on "behind the scenes" so to speak. These are quick, messy, and most are probably a 10-30 minute exercise, and generally are not for clients' eyes :)
The Site.
The site itself gave us a lot to work with, from the wooded setting to its undulating topography. Below is a quick markup of some of those features:
The basic idea in terms of siting was to orient the house with the long axis in the east-west direction to give us access to southern sun exposure. One of the initial goals was to have our house meet Passive House standards, which in part means you need to take advantage of solar gain in the form of windows on the south facade. I believe this would have been the first Passive House certified home in Richmond, and for a while I was hell bent on making it happen, perhaps to the detriment of the project schedule budget, life in general. Lesson learned, flexibility matters!
Passive House principles are something that just makes sense to me, and a lot of the building industry and codes are headed in this direction anyway. To distill it down to the three big concepts, it's:
Super insulated envelope (foundation, walls, and roof) and high-performance windows.
Air sealing of that envelope to prevent uncontrolled air infiltration.
Providing continuous, controlled ventilation to improve the indoor air quality.
The scope (size) of the house was another animal and always is on every project. When I begin a new house for a client, the first exercise is to have them complete a lengthy questionnaire that delves into almost every aspect of their lives. I make it a bit cumbersome on purpose, to slow things down a bit and really get people to think about what they want. It asks questions about what kind of light they want in their bedroom in the morning, if anyone will be working from home, questions about kids, extended family, pets, materials they love/ don't love, etc. In other words, it's not just a few questions about how many bedrooms and bathrooms are desired. Those things are all addressed later, but what matters is how the family ideally functions and how the house can best support that. In my experience most clients haven't been asked these types of probing questions as it's easier for the designer not to. But also true is these clients are currently living in a home they do not love for a variety of reasons, so why replicate what already doesn't work?
But back to our scenario, we were needing to answer these questions ourselves. We had two (now three) kids, one cat, I work from home full time and my wife sometimes, the desire for an outdoor space with southern exposure, a desired aesthetic that would fit in the natural setting and existing neighborhood, a need for space for visiting family, a desire for good acoustic privacy, morning sunlight in the master bedroom, and the list could go on and on...
And so, the next few months were spent refining the answers to all these questions, balancing the dreams and wishes with the expected financial realities of building a custom home. The design began to morph from hand sketches to the beginnings of a computer model, and all relatively quickly. But, like so many projects, while there are expected hiccups along the way, almost always the one that tops the list is project cost. We were no different, and in the next post I'll get into some more specifics about what it costs to build a home. Now here's a shocking hint, it's always more than you think!
Ben, excellent. Keep them coming. Biff and Suzy