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The Lawrence Street House – Refinements

The design is progressing. We’ve been in the refinement stage of design development, taking the thoughts and ideas that came out of our design charrette and massaging the design.

We’ve been working 3D and in plan together; that’s always a good thing. Many designers start by getting the plan worked out then “forcing” an elevation on it. That’s dangerous and can lead to amazingly mediocre design.
We work in plan and 3D at the same time, going back and forth, thinking about how a change might affect the exterior as well as how the spaces work.
One thing that came out of all this is a relatively major rearranging of our bath/utility core. Primarily this was due to walking out of the Master Bedroom and looking right into the Main Bath and the double doors into the house from the Garage (one in the Utility and one into the Kitchen). We looked at a way to improve both of those layouts and the attached picture shows where we’re ending up.
Utility: is close to the kitchen door, so coming in from working in the yard will be less obtrusive (I think we’ll have a bench in the Garage to remove shoes at least). Nice linen closet and ironing board. We’ve moved the water heater into the ceiling space above the Utility (with a drain pan) which will be insulated and adjacent to the furnace. Nice folding counter over the washer and dryer.
Main Bath: is now even a little more private from the rest of the house. By moving it where we have it, not only do we not come out of the Master Bedroom and look into the Bath, we have a great wall for artwork there and probably will do a shallow recess niche to accentuate that wall.
Master Bath: much better storage (a huge linen), nice window over the toilet and still have our large shower.
Glass Block and Natural Light: we have tried various ideas to get natural light into the interior rooms (Main Bath and Utility). Some of my initial ideas involved translucent ceilings and skylights, but simpler is always better and did prevail. You may notice on the plan small openings at the master shower and the Main Bath tub. These are glass blocks as thru-wall “windows”. The one into the Main Bath tub is a vertical stack of blocks and the one at the shower is a horizontal row just above the counter in the Utility. This will allow borrowed light from the Master Bath to filter into the interior rooms. And, if you’re concerned about privacy, they make glass blocks with filter inserts which allow the light and maintain privacy.
We’re refining the exterior, too and I’ll post that soon.
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The Lawrence Street House – Design Development

>Well, the charrette spurred some creative juices, as I mentioned. I’ve spent the last few days refining some things and developing the plan a little further. Refining it a little more. Tweaking it. Making it better.

The last sketch was an exterior idea, very rough. I’ve refined it a bit more and put a little color to it. Amazing what the 3D modeling, sketch paper, a little PhotoShop and some time will produce.
We’re actually, day by day, getting more stoked about our new house. The way it is coming together, the refinements and the minor changes that lead to continual improvements, is amazing.
I mentioned in an earlier post about how well this sort of design process works. It is proving to be true… again.
Our thoughts on the exterior are grey shingle siding above a golden stucco base. That may change when we get down to the final design, but is what we’re going with for now. I’ve also made a few changes to the interior plan — main bath, utility core and den. I’ll post those soon.
I think we’re getting close to jumping into working drawings and details. Just a little more refinement and we should be there.
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The Lawrence Street House – Charrette

What is a charrette? The classic definition is an intense period of design activity. It usually consists of gathering several of the involved people, clients and designers in one room for an uninterrupted time of brain-storming.

We have found this to be valuable, resulting in incredible results with our previous project, theSAGE, so thought we should do this with our home.
So Friday, January 29, myself, my wife, my business partner Dan and one of our staff, Ryan, sat down for about 2 1/2 hours to go over our schematic design I have shown you here over the last few posts. It was a time of collaboration and exchange of ideas, as well as a fresh look at the home.
Sometimes, we can be too close to a design. With that, it takes an “outsider’s” perspective to give some input. This time yesterday was incredibly valuable. Both Dan and Ryan understand my wife and my lifestyle enough that they gave us input and insights we hadn’t either thought of or considered.
With that, we are making some refinements to the plan layout, specifically in the main bath, utility and den areas. We also had a chance to refine the exterior direction, which is the rough sketch you see above. Our first “hit” on the exterior was good, but this is better, so we’re heading this way.
Over the next few days, I’ll be refining the plan and developing the exterior a little further. We are now entering what we call the design development phase. This means the schematic is on track, we can develop things with a little more detail and refinement before we enter the working drawings stage.
My wife and I are even more excited about the direction our home design is going and are looking forward to this next phase. The process is working. And it’s working really well.
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The Lawrence Street House – Front Porch

This post is Front Porch because we also have a Side Porch I’ll talk about in a future post.

Part of our desire to be downtown is neighborhood. Connecting with people and the whole aspect of our culture that we’ve lost in the suburbs. We’ve noticed, when walking around this neighborhood that people are out front. 15th Street is a major bike and pedestrian connector with more bikes than cars, I think.
So we wanted a place that relates our home design to the street. We found a picture of an old bungalow house that had kind of a corner wrap-around porch. That concept stuck with us. Since our lot is a corner lot, this orientation seemed to make all sorts of sense.
So here’s the result. We have a nice corner porch, south-facing, with room for a couple of chairs to sit out and drink coffee and watch the neighbors walk by. It has what we envision to be a gently curved roof to provide visual interest from the street and protection from the rain as people come to visit. Right now, we’re showing a short sidewalk to each street: Lawrence and 15th.
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The Lawrence Street House – Denofficebedroom


See, I got the title down to one word. In our plan, we have this room right off the living room. It’s one of those multi-use use rooms that help save money, space and consumption. Our three bedroom house won’t have the third bedroom sitting vacant all the time.

DEN/OFFICE: This will be the primary use for us. With both kids out on their own, this will be our home office, pay the bills area, surf the internet, play TextTwist or read a book. There is room for Brenda and I to both be here together. And with the nice south windows looking out to our front porch, it should be a pleasant space to be.
BEDROOM: The sofa you see there is actually our futon. We’re planning on reusing virtually all of our furniture and our futon is no exception. We bought it when we remodeled our Breezewood house in 1994. It’s relatively comfortable for what we’ll use it for and, with a fresh coat of paint about 6 years ago, it’ll be just fine. Since we have an actual guest bedroom with a “real” bed, this room, when used as a bedroom, will likely be for smaller grandkids (when they come). There’s a small closet.
You’ll also notice the large sliding doors to the living room. We did a similar “barn door” concept in theSAGE to separate the master bedroom from the living area. It was a big hit and we loved it, too. So we thought we’d do something like that here on Lawrence. The idea is that the Den will be open to the living area probably about 99% of the time. These doors will probably have some sort of artwork mounted to them. When the grandkids come and need a place to sleep or an area to watch a movie, they can go in the den, close the doors, adults can be in the living area and it works. The “back door” gives easy access to the bathroom at all times.
This room is small, but is as big as it needs to be. That’s something we’re wanting to get away from: big for the sake of big.
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The Lawrence Street House – Plumbing

One way to save energy is through a compact plumbing design. One of our goals as we laid out the design was to keep the plumbing — especially the hot water runs — as short as possible.

I shared that goal with a friend in the design community who said we wouldn’t be able to do it. And I’ll have to admit, this was one area where we had some struggles.
It wasn’t that easy. We could group the bathrooms and the utility room, but the kitchen sink seemed to be the sticking point. And, we had thought about a sink in the garage for clean up when working out in the yard.
Well, after many iterations of the layout, we came up with the design you see above. I think we’ll be able to get all hot water plumbing runs within 20 feet of pipe from the water heater. This will reduce pipe heat loss and also reduce water use because we won’t be waiting and waiting and waiting for the hot water to hit the faucet or shower head. Plus, we have grouped the major hot water uses, the washer, shower and tub all very close to the water heater.
Couple that all with low flow faucets and shower heads and you can see why this will save energy and water. So about the sink in the garage… You’ll notice there isn’t one. By designing the layout so we can come into the utility room from the garage, we can use the sink in there. Plus, if we need to remove dirty clothes, we have a private place to do that without tracking dirt throughout the house.
We’ve saved the cost of a sink (and the associated plumbing), doubled up on use (utility room doubles as a clothes changing area) and kept the plan even more compact. We took a similar design track in the kitchen for my espresso maker and bar sink: no bar sink. We grouped the espresso maker location close to the main sink and I’ll simply use that one. Again, we saved a sink.
And, by the way, we’ve been appreciating your comments about the design. We are compiling them and will respond as we go through some of these details. For Sue, on connecting the master bath to the utility room, we thought about that; but our lifestyle is such that it isn’t a major thing for us and the clean clothes. We do have the double-rolling hamper from the utility to the master bath (It’s between the ironing board and the utility sink).
Bryan commented about the master sinks on the exterior wall and the venting, etc. In response to Bryan, with our exterior wall system (I’ll go into more detail later), we will actually be building two 2×4 walls with a 1″ space, then foaming it all with insulation. This keeps all the plumbing on the warm side, completely seals it with insulation and still keeps the sinks close to the hot water heater. I plan on running the vent up the interior wall by the shower.
This is one area where we kept the dual sinks. Brenda and I “need” two sinks… 🙂
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The Lawrence Street House – Schematic Pt 2

As we started the design, we looked at our relationships of rooms to each other (from our notebook), the aspects of the rooms we wanted (the den needed to also double as a guest bedroom) and the relationships of all of this to the outdoor living areas of our lot and our relationship to the neighborhood.

You really can’t initially take just one thing and focus on that. Good design needs to be comprehensive. We’re going for LEED certification (targeting Platinum again!) and even LEED recognizes this. I think I’ve mentioned before in this blog (or my other blog): everything is connected. And that applies to the design, too. How and where we place the kitchen affects the rest of the house and affects how I barbecue in the summer months. The shape of the house plan affects the rooflines, which affects the ability to install solar panels. The location and shape of the garage affects the location and shape of the rest of the house. Where the basic “mass” of the house sits affects whether or not our patios get good sun (important to us) or are constantly in the shade (not good in Oregon).
We start pen on paper, freehand, rough and only generally to scale. This first part is more organizational. What rooms are generally where and how the overall flow and circulation might work.
The lot is narrow (60 feet) and, with the interior yard setback (5 feet) and the street setback (10 feet), we only have 45 feet to work with. The one aspect of our design I will focus on today is the garage and its relationship to the house and its shape. As has been the case for many years, our mindset is a 2- or 3-car garage. That’s been our culture. We, obviously, aren’t thinking a 3-car garage here, but we have settled out that even with our walking and bike riding, we want space for 2 cars.
In the normal mode of thinking (which we’re trying to change), that’s at a minimum 20 by 20 foot box. And with only a 45 foot wide building area, that can dominate the design. So how to get around that? Even with our alley access, that size box fills up our yard area. So do we want yard or garage? Can we have both?
This calls for thinking outside the box (pun intended). Appropriate, since the garage is usually a box. So we thought, could our lifestyle accept an end-to-end arrangement for the garage? Then the “box” is more like 12 feet by 40 feet (and that sets up visual issues we’ll address later), we have a smaller garage door, which lessens the auto impact, even though it’s facing the alley, and seems like it will fit our lifestyle.
The picture above is our first iteration (north is up — north is always up). The house basically is at the southwest corner of the lot, garage along the north and accessory dwelling unit at the southeast. This leaves a nice south and east facing area for patios. This gives us a more “square” arrangement for the heated part of the house (more energy and material efficient) and a much nicer yard area. The rooflines seem like they will work well this way, so we’re going to develop this a little further.
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The Lawrence Street House – Site Analysis

I know this wasn’t a one word title; sorry. Before we start designing (and the excitement of getting started builds, so there’s still that temptation. Resist!), we take a really good look at the site. We call this our site analysis. Yeah, not very creative, but accurate.

We look at a number of things. The topography of the land (it’s mostly flat, with a depression where the previous house was), the immediately surrounding features: neighboring houses, the big overgrown apple tree, power lines, utilities, and the gravel alley to name a few. How the house would relate to the surrounding neighborhood.
As I’ve mentioned, we live in a society of garage door openers and not knowing our neighbors. Our lot is unique since it’s on 15th. I talked in an earlier post how 15th is also a major bike street. In fact, we’ve noticed there is probably more bike traffic on 15th than cars. We like that. There are also more pedestrians along 15th than many suburban streets. We like that, too.
So we’re filing away the desire to not turn our backs on the street. We are going to be faced with wanting an outdoor living area for our home that has some privacy, but doesn’t turn our back on the rest of the neighborhood. We have this philosophy that our entire society would be just a little better if we related to our neighbors a little more. For us, it’s that spiritual aspect of “loving your neighbor”.
We also have a relatively non-descript four-plex to the west, across Lawrence, some nicer houses across 15th to the south and a still-vacant lot across the alley to the east. Uly’s Tamale Cart parks right along 15th (we’d like to meet Uly: anyone know him?). We want to downplay the garage, so we will be taking access to the garage off the alley. We absolutely want to take advantage of solar (patio, photovoltaic and hot water). Since we’re on the corner, we’d kind of like it if our front door related to the corner. And we have the ability to increase density on our urban lot by building what’s called an accessory dwelling unit (ADU).
ADUs are a secondary house on the same lot that could be a place for elderly parents to live or a rental house. An ADU can be no larger than 800 square feet and we want to take advantage of that for a several reasons: our lot is large (9,000 sq ft) and this is a better use of land, we’ll have a place for elderly parents if needed, and if not, we’ll have the ability for rental income as we head into retirement.
You can see it’s important to think through and evaluate these things BEFORE you start designing. It saves changes (or mistakes) later.
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The Lawrence Street House – Schematic Pt 1

We’ve started the design. After we synthesize the notebook (it’s good to organize your thoughts, even when designing your own home), we started sketching. I plotted out a scale site plan with the surrounding houses, trees, streets, etc.

Making note of the site analysis information and thinking about the factors that arise in that process, we can actually start designing the house. Finally. Most times, we as architects meet with our client and go over their notebook. We try to “get into their head” as to what they want, what the pictures and descriptions they’ve compiled actually mean. If they’ve done a good, comprehensive job on this, our job as an architect is much easier.
We have also owned this lot since last summer. So we have taken bike rides past our lot, stopped and just savored the neighborhood. We’ve eaten at our favorite restaurant (just three blocks away) and walked around the neighborhood. We’ve become intimately familiar with this piece of ground near downtown.
I’m also in a bit of a unique situation since this is my house and my wife and I are the clients. So this process is a little different. As I mentioned in my earlier “programming” post, my wife has really good ideas — some I haven’t thought of. So when the time came to sit down with pen and paper, she sat with me, too.
And, yes, this techno-geek-early-adopter still designs with pen on paper. As much as I’d like to go paperless, and I do in many areas, when it comes to the free flow of ideas in an initial design of a house, pen and paper is still the best.
We sat down for an uninterrupted afternoon, looked through our notebook again, talked about the surrounding aspects of the lot we’ve now owned for about 6 months and started.
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The Lawrence Street House – Programming

I’m trying to title each of these posts with a one-word summary. Site. Beginnings. You know, try to keep it simple. After all, this is thesimpleHOUSE.
So this next step in our process is called “programming”. I tried to look for a better word, because programming is long, sounds technical and doesn’t quite have the sexiness of a word like “beginnings”. But there really isn’t a better word, so I stayed with that.

Programming is where we take the information from a client (in this case, myself and my wife) and help them organize it into a framework where we can move into a schematic design (for starters) of their home.
You would think since I’m an architect and am designing my own home for myself and my wife (who I’ve been happily married to for almost three decades), we could dispense with the programming and just start designing. Well, that was the temptation.
But I’m so convinced of our process and the years of experience with it that we did it, too. My wife and I sat down and “programmed” our new home. The first picture above is one aspect of this process. We have a matrix where we link all the rooms and areas of our home and decide what kind of relationship we want between them. We color-code this with “direct”, “indirect” or “no relationship”. This is the first part of the process.
The second part (represented by the second picture) is going room by room and listing ideas, thoughts and dreams specific to that room. Downloading images and taking pictures of things we like are also incorporated into a page for each room. Any furniture we intend to keep (“reuse” is one of the three “R”s) is measured and listed at the bottom of the page for that room.
After all that is compiled, it creates a very comprehensive basis for starting a design. The other benefit it does is it gets the client (in this case me and my wife) talking and communicating about what we would like. It can be (and was for us) a wonderful process of thoughts, ideas and dreams. And I discovered even non-architects (my wife) often have really good ideas I haven’t thought of. And that’s how we grow and learn and get better at what we do.