by Craig Claus
I have to question an approach used by many architects and design professionals that substitutes an average homeowner as the client in a system that was setup to handle large commercial projects. For a 25,000 sq ft house on $50 million budget it might work, but for a 2,500 sq ft house? Tens of thousands of dollars spent on subcontracts to surveyors, engineers, and consultants for a house with a total budget typically under $500k is just overkill. To start with, it kills the typical homeowner’s budget. Next, it uses up their time by dragging them through a prolonged process, and finally, it misses the mark for what is important in residential design.
How to save money on design (and construction): Plan the layout with structure in mind, without foregoing all other aspects of floor plan layout, think of how the floors, roof, and foundation will align and what type of spans are possible for the load requirements. Most aspects of residential frames are engineered by the materials supplier or the product manufacturer - like engineered floor systems and truss roofs. Also, material suppliers have estimators that use plans to generate materials lists - don’t pay someone to do it. Here’s another secret: the American Concrete Institute has a “recipe”code that covers most residential foundations without an architect’s or engineer’s stamp.
How to shorten the process: Realize that much of the details in homes are figured out along way. The owner wants to make their decisions about siding, cabinets, and flooring, and they don’t need to have everything figured out before the plans are finalized. Finish schedules are fine for a hospital, but unnecessary for a home. Even electrical plans are too much. Every owner walks through the rough framed house with their electrician point to where they want switches and fixtures, and the electrician aligns their desires with electrical code.
What’s really important in residential design: Communication between the owner and the designer. A design professional should listen to what the owner wants, not tell them what they can have. Communicate the owner’s vision to the designer. Communicate the design to the owner. A single hand-sketched and hand-colored elevation may be able to sell a design to the board of a company, but it doesn’t communicate the relational components of living space to the person who will live, eat, and entertain in a home. Two-dimensional floor plans can be like calculus for someone just learning to add. Using fast, flexible modeling software, the design can be shown from any perspective and adjusted on the fly. Drawings communicate the design to the trades and the industry.
That’s enough for now.
I just posted the first entry to my blog in months. Could this be my New Year’s resolution? If it is, I suppose I should have started January 1st. Maybe I’m just coming out of hibernation early.
Other than blogging, what else is there to do at 5am when the rest of the house is asleeep?
Here’s to more frequent blogging. Cheers.
by Craig D. Claus
I recently had the great pleasure of attending a presentation by John Wagner, who is an author and speaker in the Green industry. The event was sponsored by a local building materials supplier, Brock’s, and Boston Cedar. The target audience was builders and contractors wanting to know more about how to qualify a product as green, how to get on handle on the hype, and then market themselves as “green”. John’s presentation was part of Boston Cedar’s Green Road Show series.
Wagner has a lot of knowledge about building materials and construction, and has a very down-to-earth opinion on what makes a product green. For instance, his view of vinyl siding (which I share) as a “green” product - it has great longevity, can be made from recycled material and can be recycled, but mostly, it requires no scraping, painting, staining, etc. and doesn’t consume the human energy that wood siding does. The total life cycle of the product needs to be considered.
He also was quite honest about how some products have been banned only to be replaced by worse products that seemed less toxic. Either the process to produce the new product or the disposal of the product are problem. Some materials have been banned because the name of a chemical contained in the product sounded toxic
John suggested that builders (specifically, those in residential new construction and remodeling) looking for a rating system consider the NAHB Green Building Program versus the LEED for Homes system. The NAHB (National Assoc. of Home Builders) system is better suited to residential construction and is gaining widespread acceptance in the industry. His suggestion was for those in attendance who were looking at the Certified Green Professional designation, which recognizes builders, remodelers and other industry professionals who incorporate green building principles into homes. I guess I will be going to CGP training soon.
by Craig Claus
Shingle Style can describe a wide variety of informal homes that have a certain woodsy, vacationing, seaside or mountain cottage “feel”. Beyond the common shingle and stone clad exteriors, there are several architectural house types whose features can be found in the Shingle Style home. Historically, the style includes certain Queen Anne elements such as steep slope roofs, cross gables, turrets and wrapping porches. Other common Shingle Style elements are borrowed from Colonial Revival, using components of the style that includes gambrel roofs and palladian windows.
Some marks of the Style are the wrapped wood shingle exterior, asymmetrical floor plans, exteriors and roof lines, and a flavor of cottage airiness. The strong connection to the outdoors via wide covered porches - screened, 4-season, or open - and the informal living spaces, make Shingle Style homes a great match to lakefront vacation living. About.com contributer Jackie Craven identifies typical Shingle Style features as being irregular roof lines, cross gables, eaves on several levels, porches, and an asymmetrical floor plan. She also lists some additional features that a home may have: wavy wall surfaces, patterned shingles, squat half-towers, palladian windows, and rough-hewn stone on lower stories, around windows, or on porches.
My own implementation of the Shingle Style combines elements from the Arts and Crafts or Craftsman style, using a bungalow’s squat shed dormers and banks of square divided-light windows. Oversized tapered square columns and built-up corners or tapered round columns, full or half post on a stone base, are other unique features that I may include in designs. Roof and deck brackets as well as exposed rafter tails have also been adopted from the Craftsman home in some designs.
Adirondack furniture, decor, colors, and details have also influenced what lakeshore vacationers are looking for in a home designed for recreation and relaxation. Green and red trim, and richly stained or natural wood shingles topping natural gray stone veneers are used to lay a home softly into the landscape.
The modern incarnation may also include a large porch that is integral to the floorplan and extends the living space with eating and sitting areas around wood-burning fireplaces. Large central stone fireplaces with timber mantels are a common component, as are barn boards, exposed beams, open staircases, beadboard wainscoting and ceilings; and all types of light and dark finished woods - oak, hickory, maple, fir.
Transom windows atop mulled repeating tall windows open up the vertical and horizontal components of the view. Cottage style double hung windows on bays and dormers, and window seats create informal areas to recline, nap, and catch a water or woodland view. Wooden carriage house garage doors compliment the package of strong roof lines, multiple dormers, and layering of nesting, repeating, and scaled forms.
Themes of the New Shingle Style have emerged from my experience designing homes based on the lifestyles, values, budgets, and vision of the vacationing, retiring, and retreating clients that I have had the pleasure of working with.
by Craig Claus
We (Marion and I) had a fun time hanging out with fellow exhibitors and meeting and speaking with a great bunch of attendees at the Lakeside Living Expo, July 18-20 at Gunstock Mountain in Gilford, New Hampshire. Despite some not so nice weather, over 5,000 people attended the three day event. I’d say it was a great success for a first year event to have that large a crowd and to also draw over 200 exhibitors. There was a large contingent of log home and post and beam dealers/manufacturers as well as displays of Adirondack style furniture and decor.
Below is a photo from the show of one of my favorite booths. I thought it was a nice combination of wood and stone, log and timbers. A couple of the booth dwellers were nice enough to let me take a picture, and they even smiled for the camera.
At the Fryeburg (Maine) Home Garden and Flower Show this weekend, I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on the current and future state of energy efficient and green homes. The panel and the seminar series was sponsored by Smart HomeOwner Magazine. One attendee asked about where the starting point is for new home construction if you’re at square one. One panel member answered with making sure you have a tight building envelope. After he had made his point, I was quick to insert that design and planning should come first. Choosing your site is critical, or if you have a site - then situating the structure on the site and developing the design, location, and orientation in parallel. Room locations, window sizes and types, roof overhangs, and landscape are just few of the factors to consider before you ever get to sealing the building envelope.
We then agreed as a panel that the first step in moving toward a “high-performance home” is reducing heating, cooling, electrical, and other building systems loads.
by Craig Claus
Alright, what’s the deal with the prior posts on comprehensive design? Is one house really all that different from another? As long as there’s enough rooms to cover the basics of cooking, sleeping, bathing, and television watching, why should we spend time and money on customized design? Isn’t the house a proven product?
I think we are seeing that the house is not a static commodity. I’ve been in many new houses that are just places for cooking, sleeping, bathing, and watching tv; they are not warm places of refuge and not any place that families or friends want to gather. Even prior to the green building trend, many home owners started looking at designing places that work with a scaled-down lifestyle. They found that the formal living and dining rooms weren’t being used, and that the “open concept” reaction was not providing a comfortable space that had the quality of shelter. The scale of daily human life is not encompassed in the push to minimize cost per square foot.
I recently toured a home touted as the “21st century green home”. It was really the same old home-in-a-box with “green” technologies and materials applied to it. That’s a good first step, but definitely not a comprehensive design. Site orientation, roof overhangs, and window positions were not even considered. There was a huge room over the garage that was just eating up space and bloating the square footage number. The most basic step in creating a “green” home should be mating the design of the structure to the technology and materials, rather than retrofitting green products to stock plans. Designing a place that encourages the owners to think, reflect, and live through the quality of the space is really the ultimate goal. People that are contemplative and love life and liberty will do more for our society and environment than a well-intentioned intellectual preoccupied with just making it through the day or week.
Can we create a home that helps the human spirit to thrive?
by Craig Claus
I was recently reading through the AIBD (American Institute of Building Design) publication Design Lines and came across an article entitled “The Well-Designed House” by Varina Wooster. In the article she looks at the essential principles of architecture that were set forth by the roman architect, Vitruvius, as being commodity, firmness, and delight. It made me think of my own definition of value as applied to house design as being a combination of efficiency, durability, and quality.
The 1st century BC writer, architect, and engineer, Marcus Vitruvius, is famous for his book De architectura, in which he asserts that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas. These three qualities have been commonly translated as commodity, firmness, and delight. They have also been interpreted as strong or durable, useful, and beautiful. More wordy descriptions of the three elements are: appropriate spatial accommodation, structural stability, and attractive appearance.
Whatever its modern-day verbiage, it’s nice to know that after two thousand years we can still arrive at a similar quantification of the important features and qualities that describe a “Well-Designed” building. As builders, code councils, and material manufacturers race to see who can be the most “green”, let’s not abandon the principles that have helped to guide good architecture for, well, at least 2,000 years. Let’s continue to use a systems solution that incorporates a responsible approach to sourcing, using, and disposing of materials, that designs a structure that is site-specific, and incorporates new or long-known energy-efficient technologies in a way that makes both social and economic sense, as well as giving a little credence to our friend Vitruvius.
by Craig Claus
I’ve put together a matrix to try to get a better feel for this concept of Comprehensive Design. It shows some areas of architectural design, building materials, and construction methods where the components of “value” could apply. The matrix displays how principles of efficiency, durability, and quality can help guide decision-making through the design-build process. The specific application requires a dedication to value from the owner, builder, and architect/designer.
I’ve been trying to encapsulate my design style, philosophy, etc. in a paragraph or two then give it a title of some type. The best I’ve come up with thus far is “comprehensive design”. I really want to stress a “whole” house design approach that addresses clients needs while educating them on what I think a house should be. I’ve chosen the word “warm”, Susanka uses the the term “shelter”. And though there is a commonality that may run through different styles, applying a base set of principles, it can take on different flavors for each owner.
I’ve distilled the result of a comprehensive design to “value”. My definition of value, with regard to house design, has three components: efficiency, durability, and quality. Efficiency includes considerations for the site, building layout, spaces and connections, use of materials and resources, cost and labor. Two major aspects of durability, at least as far as materials, are longevity and sustainability, but durability may also refer to timeless style or flexible floor plans. Finally, quality (being the most ambiguous component) could easily be misconstrued to mean the best - most expensive - of everything. It ’s more about proper usage or making the most of whatever the scenario is. It is relevant to not only the materials, but to the created space itself, the way the building works with the site, the indoor air and the systems that are part of the construction and operation of the home.
The big buzz word now is “green” and many are just installing new systems or using different materials to meet some guidelines for energy and materials usage. I hesitate to limit efficiency to merely how much energy is used to heat or cool a home. What good is it to build a “green” home that is just plain ugly and will be torn down in 30 years when styles change? That’s where durability comes in. That’s why a comprehensive solution is needed - something well-thought out that has value beyond the energy it does or does not use.
