The depressing part? The building would cost more to construct than the bank will appraise it for. The potential impact of this new development is not quantifiable by any measure that would result in full funding for the endeavor, so it’s on hold for now. 

Part of why the project’s economics are so skewed (it’s budgeted at $7.4 million and appraised at $2.4 million) is attributable to the increases in construction and material costs. Higher interest rates factor in as well. But the biggest problem is the lack of comparable properties in and around this small town in Maine—nearly an hour away from Portland and Bangor—to convince the banks to lend. It is a vicious circle—there will never be comps if there must be comps to build in the first place. There can be no eggs without ever hatching the first chicken. 

This is a very tough problem for rural America, as the Journal story points out, but it’s a perennial problem for custom residential—its clients, its architects, and its builders—in any part of the country. The cost to build a one-of-a-kind house of real design rigor, quality materials, and high performance is nothing a bank would ever underwrite in full. And thus, the best custom residential design is often confined to those clients who can fill the funding gap, or swallow the entire bill themselves.

Quality custom design has never been so far out of reach for even well-off professionals—more so if they want to build something specific to their needs. Take a look at the vacation home on page 21 that architects Charles Haver and Stewart Skolnick designed for themselves on Fishers Island, New York. They kept the footprint small because they didn’t need a big house, yet its 1,200 square feet consumed $1,500 a square foot for good materials, construction for coastal conditions, and the surcharge for bringing everything in from the mainland. Plus, it took the best custom builder in the area 18 months to finish. This math does not count design fees or the purchase price of the scenic double lot.   

No bank would assess the house, with just one bedroom, as you or I would—especially after the architects donated a lot to the local land conservancy. Our appraisal system understands nothing about merit. It is amorally transactional and abysmally shortsighted. Consider the true worth of that donated lot that can never be built on. As the famous commercial says, it’s priceless.

The post Editor’s Note: The Value of Nothing appeared first on Residential Design.

Next up among our winners is DNA Alpine by CCY, a 2,000-square-foot mountain home, bermed into a hill on a 70-acre property. The architects and the clients applied all their discipline to fight the typical program inflation. The clients accepted a tiny sleeping loft for extra guests, instead of more expansive guest quarters, among the belt-tightening. As a result, they preserved ancient view corridors and every single spruce tree on the site.

Certainly, they demonstrated admirable restraint, but they were not alone. Verde Creek Ranch by Lake | Flato is just a touch over 3,000 square feet, yet it shelters an extended family of siblings on more than 2,000 acres. Most of the structure is open connective tissue linking shared spaces with small private zones. 

Indeed, one phrase our jury kept uttering was, “It’s more pavilion than house.” It’s obvious our winners thought holistically about how to deploy every element of the building in service to the site—often making more “outside than inside.” It’s a strategy that paid great dividends during the worst of the COVID pandemic.  

Important outdoor spaces were mined on projects of mere fractions of an acre, too. A rowhouse in D.C. acquired a tiny “Middle Garden” by Colleen Healey Architecture that transformed its tight little rooms into a light-filled oasis of indoor-outdoor living. And a more expansive teardown on a precipitous site in Seattle by GO’C fit a prolific vegetable garden on the roof, along with a full solar array—oh, and a backyard pool with panoramic views. Although the house is one of our larger ones at more than 5,000 square feet, its efficient floor plan brings together a blended family of eight.

One of my personal favorites, Palm House II, an infill house in Venice, California, by kevin daly Architects, adds onto an adjacent property to accommodate a growing multigenerational family. The program priority? Preserve and expand space for outdoor congregation. Kevin and his team designed the new building to form a shared courtyard with the older building, and carved out multiple private outdoor areas shielded by screens, trees, and other sleights of hand. 

Less indoor space means more outdoors to enjoy on every one of these winning projects, and the real winners are the lucky clients. That is as it should be. 

The post Editor’s Note: Less Is More appeared first on Residential Design.

I’ve believed similarly about architecture degrees—that they forge a unique bridge between left brain and right brain, preparing you to approach every undertaking with the problem-solving superpower of design thinking. You might not ultimately apply those skills to buildings, but nearly everything in our world could benefit from improved aesthetics and function—or complete reinvention from top to bottom.

I understand that, given the expense of secondary and beyond education these days, there’s enormous pressure to secure a return on the investment as quickly as possible upon graduation. This is especially true for immigrants to the U.S. or first-generation college attendees. But locking in specific career trajectories so early on and divorcing them from any true passion for the subject matter seems like a recipe for lasting job dissatisfaction and perhaps even middling performance in those careers. Passion is the engine that drives innovation and achievement. 

Yes, we all need to find a way to reliably feed and house ourselves, but I’d argue that trained creative thinkers are more likely to adapt to changes in what the world needs from us. Today’s highly specific STEM major might prove to be a moribund field in 10 years, as we veer off in another more promising direction. Dead ends happen all the time. Maybe a chatbot really could write this column now or in a couple of years. 

But can a chatbot tap into a flow state that synthesizes a lifetime of learning, observation, and practice into something cogent and transformative? Or is that a uniquely human ability facilitated by education in the arts and humanities? How often have you tapped that flow while you were drawing or absorbing other work by inspiring architects?

Inspiration may in fact be our greatest quality as human beings, along with the potential to act on it and invent something new, valuable, beautiful. I admire architects not just for their own sensibilities and what they can generate from them, but also their talent for eliciting creativity, skills, and problem solving from other collaborating disciplines—the metalworker, the finish carpenter, the structural engineer. 

Nothing is more powerful than the capacity to be inspired and to inspire others, helping us all to reach heights we thought were beyond us. In fact, it’s unquantifiable.

The post Editor’s Note: Chasing STEM appeared first on Residential Design.

The 10 metrics (and all the supporting detail they require) in the application are an admirable attempt to quantify what constitutes “design excellence,” which can be an inherently qualitative and subjective determination. Because some of the categories are highly technical, requiring a deep knowledge of various codes and building performance standards, there are now technical pre-screeners who review the applications before the jury sees the entries. The idea is that a building with a very low score in these metrics should not be a strong contender for an award.

But, wait, there’s more. There are now multiple types of awards that can be given—ones that acknowledge standout achievements within one or more of the 10 metrics. For instance, a home run in “Design for Discovery,” “Design for Economy,” “Design for Equitable Communities,” etc., can lock in a Special Commendation award. Hit on even more metrics and you might win a Climate Action Award. There are still Honor Awards and Merit Awards, but they are harder now to achieve without a strong showing in the 10 metrics. 

For the most part, this new format constitutes progress toward quantifying the value architects bring to design and construction and encouraging more rigorous standards of sustainability. That said, these applications may feel onerous to small residential practitioners already struggling to keep all of the balls in the air for their projects and practices. Honestly, many aspects of the Framework for Design Excellence are best suited to larger-scale projects than single-family custom homes. Yes, we should expect an airport or a state capitol building to meet or exceed all of the AIA’s metrics for design excellence, but what about that small, rural vacation home that replaces an obsolete structure on the owners’ property? Can that jewel box building never be recognized for its design excellence when evaluated in the same competition as an urban charter school or homeless shelter? 

Custom residential projects are always going to lose when measured against more virtuous and impactful building types—even when every effort is made to design and build them more sustainably. And I’m not sure how you solve that problem, except to judge them against each other on their own merits. 

The post Editor’s Note: Quantifying Quality? appeared first on Residential Design.

In most prosperous urban areas, where we are more likely to find clients who can afford construction projects, desirable sites are largely built out. That means you have to add in the cost of removing an existing building, the headaches of permitting for new construction, and working around cranky neighbors for the two- or three-year timeline of a new build. It’s no wonder the math seems to tip solidly toward renovation. 

But pros know that numbers can lie. When renovating undistinguished buildings of mediocre character and middling materials, clients often discover after the fact that the math was not the home run they’d hoped for. Usually, the construction team encounters an unforeseen problem and the budget starts to swell. And then, as the project advances, the compromises imposed by existing conditions become more obvious and regretful.  

It’s not uncommon for clients to come to the end of the journey and conclude that it would not have cost much more to build it right from the start—with better function, better performance, better and longer-lasting materials, and so on. 

Design/builder Paul Field learned this firsthand with his own house in Dallas, which he had remodeled over the years as funds became available. Just prior to COVID, he and his family had decided the alterations no longer worked for them, and they set about finding a lot for a new build. They looked for a year but came to realize they’d had the best lot all along. It was better to replace their old cottage with a new house designed from the ground up for how they really wanted to live. The striking new building (featured in our Case Study on page 22) is a wonderful addition to the neighborhood—if you can find it behind its multiple tiers of green roofs.  

Our Design Lab feature on page 30 looks at three additional urban infill houses that reconceive how a city house can occupy its site and serve its owners. One in California by EYRC creates precious outdoor space where everyone was sure there could be none. Another in Minnesota by PKA finds a way to infuse the pleasures of outdoor living in an inhospitable climate. And our third in Seattle by Hybrid densifies a squandered site, cleverly squeezing four flexible, affordable dwelling units into the space of a duplex. 

For our interiors story on page 14, we feature Nicole Blair’s project, The Perch, a 660-square-foot building that hovers above the owners’ bungalow—offering them multiple possibilities for function in a simply knock-out form.

The post Editor’s Note: Repair or Replace? appeared first on Residential Design.

I suspect another subtle motivator is the human compulsion to try to command at least one important aspect of our lives, while external forces impose restrictions and difficulties upon us that we cannot control. It didn’t take long for us to make major shifts in our priorities—in where we want to live and how we want to live. Who knew that dedicated home offices would become nearly as essential as a kitchen or bathroom? Or that outdoor entertaining space would commandeer almost as much attention as the coveted family room. 

This is our annual whole-house remodeling issue, and the projects are wonderfully, wildly different—two Midcentury projects in California and a duo of 200-plus-year-old houses in New England. 

Our cover story is an 1880s Boston townhouse reimagined as a multi-floor showcase for a dynamic semi-retired couple with keen taste. Although located on a severely constrained urban lot, architect David Hacin and his firm carved out a myriad of al fresco destinations—including a private ground-level plunge pool and a rooftop lounge with a view of the Charles River. 

The dazzling transformation ensures that every inch of the home’s six floors will be occupied and enjoyed to the fullest. And, indeed, it accomplished just that when the couple’s adult children moved home for the worst of the pandemic. There were places for them to convene as a family and places for solitary refuge as well. 

On the other side of the country, in Malibu, California, our Design Lab lead story is a 1970s house designed by Midcentury master Jerrold Lomax. Shortly before he died, he turned over custody of its remodel to Zoltan Pali of SPF:architects—a friend and protégé. The challenge for Zoltan, who revered Jerrold, was to honor the spirit of the man and the building, known as the Taylor Beach House, while taking advantage of today’s modern building technologies to attain its full potential.

Shoring up the structure and fixing flaws in its functionality were paramount, and SPF:a achieved both with virtually no sign of the surgical strikes to the exterior. On the inside, however, the house is newly imbued with light, air, and sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. And yes, the firm managed to tuck in a few additional outdoor spaces, as well. 

  When under siege, as we have been and, perhaps, still are, humans have a strong drive to hunker down in our own private fortresses—with the essentials in place to weather the storm and a few delights to lift our hearts and spirits. 

The post Editor’s Notes: Defenses and Delights appeared first on Residential Design.

The house achieved this with walls of windows on three sides of its great room. There was a deep back porch that filtered the western sun, and another deep front porch that titrated the southern exposure. The room had a double-height living area at the center, then the ceiling dropped over the flanking dining and fireside sitting areas. We called the central zone the cocktail lounge, because it felt social and celebratory, while the dining and sitting areas were far more intimate and cozy—all this in just one well-planned room. 

The house was built by an interior designer and a builder for themselves, and they knew what they were doing. Sure, there were some flaws, but they got the major moves just right. Floor planning really is everything, and it goes wrong in so many houses. As we know, it’s among the most expensive aspects of a house to fix later on. The biggest mistake? Windows in just one direction.

Every now and then, I pine for another weekend home in the mountains. And then I remember the terrible traffic getting to and from. I recall the exorbitant carrying costs of two houses, and the stress of trying to maintain them both. Unless you have deep pockets and can hire everything done for you, you spend all that imagined relaxation time pulling hard labor at each location. (Although I do admit I enjoyed mowing the rural lawn with the tractor.)

What’s the answer to this vacation house craving if you don’t want to or can’t afford to own more than one property? This issue of RD offers a solution—design your primary home as if it were a vacation house. Did my weekend place require those long-range mountain views to wield its power over me? Actually, the closer view of the pond and its paper birch trees was more bewitching; and a favorite reading chair nestled by the fire was the best place on earth come wintertime. 

The houses we feature in this issue are located in beautiful places, but most are full-time residences. And if you examine their key features, it’s clear to see they would still lift the spirits even without their long-range vistas. A curated view of a garden, courtyard, or stand of trees would do the trick, too. Humans crave nature and natural light, but also shelter and protection. We don’t need to spend hours on the highway every weekend to find the prospect and refuge we seek.

The post Editor’s Note: Vacation at Home appeared first on Residential Design.

When those of us with flexible professions came home, it’s as if someone finally turned on the lights and we could see our houses clearly. And, oh my, we could hear so much more clearly, too. And what were we seeing and hearing? Well, that several key trends from the last two decades were not without flaws. First and foremost, the “great room” is not so great after all. Fully open plans that blend kitchen, living, dining into one large space are fantastic when we’re in a leisurely family or party mode, but they are loud, crowded, and generally unpleasant when our family needs to do five different things at the same time in the same space. And, honestly, even in the before times, they were problematic if one person wanted to watch the morning news and another wanted to read by the fire in sweet silence. (Guess my preference.)

During lockdown, those of us who were fortunate enough to still have a separate dining room with doors discovered it was the perfect unscripted space that could be conscripted for a variety of functions—dinners with our extended pod, a virtual classroom, an extra home office or conference room. 

But the real takeaway here is the need for “away rooms”—ones with doors. When space and budget are at a premium, these flex spaces can be added to rooms with a different primary function—an alcove in a primary bedroom or a built-in desk in a guest room. How about a nicer laundry room with a window and a built-in table for folding laundry? Voilà, another Zoom room. 

Not all away rooms have to be indoors. Protected outdoor space became especially precious during COVID, and it remains vital to our well-being. Access to nature is a proven balm for physical and mental health.

Around the same time we started to lose separate dining rooms, we also lost an important room most older houses offered: a first-floor bedroom with either a dedicated bathroom or full bathroom nearby. Families who found themselves having to isolate in their own houses were very lucky to have this feature in their homes. Tending to someone ill is much easier if they are on the main level of the house. 

This miserable interlude has forced us to revise our priorities and our expectations for our houses. It turns out that prior generations, who lived through pandemics and world wars, knew a thing or two about what our houses need to handle in a crisis. 

The post Editor’s Note: Getting Real appeared first on Residential Design.

Somehow, they believe, that without the constraints of pleasing a paying customer, they would hit new heights of creativity and invention. Perhaps that’s true, or perhaps it’s not. It’s quite possible that, instead, they would spin out of control into self-indulgent excess or punishing austerity. 

Clients serve a higher purpose beyond their check-writing abilities. They are like editors, and architects are often better off when clients keep hold of the balloon strings, making sure that over-inflated designers don’t veer off into the clouds—or tangle with trees and power lines. 

Real budgets also serve as a kind of de facto editor, setting rational limits of size and scope on projects. These constraints combine with those of the site and jurisdiction to make residential architecture among the most compelling of the building types. Despite the dreams of complete freedom, the practice as a whole really is better for having these bumpers in place. And more architects are catching on to this. 

As the discipline of modernist residential architecture has matured, it has incorporated these constraints and others to evolve into a more dignified and humble aesthetic. Architects have absorbed these lessons and learned to edit themselves, striving more adroitly for solutions that are sensitive to precedent, site, and program. Nowadays, architects often find themselves editing their clients, instead of the other way around.

This virtuous circle of discipline and rigor yields wonderful results. One of the best aspects to emerge from this evolution is a new fearlessness and humility about looking to the past for better ways forward. Our cover story is a case in point. Architects Luis Ibarra and Teresa Rosano borrowed from Latin American precedents for a multigenerational house in Tucson, Arizona. It’s a courtyard design (an even earlier precedent) that balances privacy and neighborhood proximity, and tempers hot days and cool nights. It uses traditional elements, but executes them in creative, sculptural ways. The mix achieves a kind of timelessness that straddles the future and the past, while seeming fresh and vibrant. 

Our Design Lab projects also plumb the diversity of this new inclusive and modest modernism. Reinvention doesn’t require a blank slate, and, in fact, it can’t exist without what came before. All it needs is a sharp editor. 

The post Editor’s Note: Get Me Rewrite appeared first on Residential Design.

As we begin the new year,

The question is, what will the new normal look like?

For those who have toiled from home even before the pandemic, work life might not change that radically. Certainly, we will all be glad to go out to lunch—and dinner—and all those wonderful activities we’ve gone without for so long. We will meet face to face with clients and colleagues again, reinforcing those ineffable human connections that are so hard to conjure on video calls and phone calls. We will stand close, putting our heads together over plans, computer screens, iPads, napkin sketches. We will walk home sites unencumbered by masks, breathing in the earthy fragrances of the trees, grass, flowers.

Residential architects who maintain studios outside the home will welcome this return to normalcy, too, but you have more ahead of you to consider. It may be time for a deeper reckoning on how and where you work. Will you, should you, bring everyone back to a shared workspace?

Surely, some members of your firm miss the collaborative exchange that comes of working in close physical proximity. There are those serendipitous moments when someone glimpses another’s computer screen and a creative spark is ignited, a problem is solved, a new path is taken. Then there’s the more formal crit, when everyone comes together to brainstorm a project pinned to the wall. There is gold in these moments together.

But, there’s also the tiresome commute to the office and the real struggle of triangulated trips to the jobsite and school or childcare pickups. Liberated from these concerns, some of your people may have concluded they are more efficient and happier working from home. Or maybe they would be happier working from another home base entirely— from another city or town?

Yes, last year we were locked in the shadows but, at the same time, we may also have seen our lives in a new light. Must we go to an office? Or, must we go there every day?

When the COVID fog finally lifts, not everyone will reinvent their workplaces right away. You might choose a hybrid model for the near term—asking your staff to come in several times a week for full or partial days. You might eventually downsize your space and infuse it with some of the pleasures of home—an outdoor space, perhaps.

Ah, but reinvention is your wheelhouse, and when you figure out what the new pro- gram is, you’ll know just what to do.

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