August 2012 – On ErikaRS' Mind

Decks and Green Roof

Posted on August 27, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

Decks and patios can be just as important to a house as the main rooms. If properly designed, they too act as rooms of the house. Like interior rooms, they should connect logically to the rest of the house, and to attract people to them, they must be spacious and laid out properly.

The obvious place for a deck is outside the living room to the west. It is easily accessible from the main floor and looks out towards the view. We made it about the same size as the living room, nestled into the corner of the stair tower.

The second natural deck location is the roof of the garage. This temptingly large surface is roughly level with the second floor. Following the Roof Garden pattern, the space is divided into a green roof and a deck. A built in bench provides a nice sitting space. The deck portion was designed lower than the green roof, giving a sense of sitting in the greenery.

Several patterns helped guide our design:

Outdoor Room (163)

Problem: A garden is the place for lying in the grass, swinging, croquet, growing flowers, throwing a ball for the dog. But there is another way of being outdoors: and its needs are not met by the garden at all.
Therefore: Build a place outdoors which has so much enclosure round it, that it takes on the feeling of a room, even though it is open to the sky. To do this, define it at the corners with columns, perhaps roof it partially with a trellis or a sliding canvas roof, and create “walls” around it, with fences, sitting walls, screens, hedges, or the exterior walls of the building itself.
In our home: Both of our decks are designed as outdoor rooms. The main deck mirrors the living room in position and size. It has a railing that feels comfortably enclosing, but still leaves a connection to the wider outdoors. Its placement gives it some of the best views in the house, while directly connecting it to the main social spaces. It will be easy and attractive to move from the living room to the deck when the weather allows. It has a natural gas outlet available so we can use a grill out there in the future.

The upper deck is a private room. It is enclosed by the building wall on one side and the back of the bench on the other. It has a bit of roof overhang to enclose it, too. The location off of the master bathroom and laundry room makes it easily accessible for the family. The bench and green roof make it an attractive place to spend time.

Six-Foot Balcony (167)

Problem: Balconies and porches which are less than six feet deep are hardly every used.
Therefore: Whenever you build a balcony, a porch, a gallery, or a terrace always make it at least six feet deep. It possible, recess at least a part of it into the building so that it is not cantilevered out and separated from the building by a simple line, and enclose it partially.
In our home: The main deck off the living room is about the same size of our living room. It sits in two corners of the house to achieve a recessed feel.The upper deck is wider but not as deep as the lower deck. It is about 10′ deep, including the bench. Being above the garage, it feels tightly attached to the rest of the building.

Roof Garden (118)

Problem: A vast part of the earth’s surface, in a town, consists of roofs. Couple this with the fact that the total area of a town which can be exposed to the sun is finite, and you will realize that it is natural, and indeed essential, to make roofs which take advantage of the sun and air.
Therefore: Make parts of almost every roof system usable as roof gardens. Make these parts flat, perhaps terraced for planting, with places to sit and sleep, private places. Place the roof gardens at various stories, and always make it possible to walk directly out onto the roof garden from some lived-in part of the building.
In our home: The biggest accessible roof space in our house is above the garage. We split that into a roof garden and a deck. The roof garden is a green roof system from GreenFeathers. Plants are grown in modules at the company’s nursery for several months. Once the plants are established, they are transported to our house. The modules are placed on the roof, and the liners are removed to connect the sections together. It is designed for our climate and should need almost no maintenance. During the hottest days of summer it will need a bit of hand-watering; but otherwise will take care of itself. We have the largest green roof in the development so far, and we went with some deeper modules. The deeper modules allow larger plants to grow, including some that will turn in to small bushes. There are a variety of plants to provide variation in height, color, and bloom time. The layout includes some terra cotta stones to provide access to all parts of the garden.

The deck next to the green roof provides a sitting (and even sleeping) space. It feels tightly integrated with the plants, placing a garden at your back as you sit on the bench.

The other major part of our roof is the butterfly top. It is not so easily accessible, so we did not add a deck or garden up there. To make it potentially usable space in the future, we ran a conduit from the electrical box to the roof. This will allow us to easily add solar panels on the roof when we desire.

From layout, we moved to materials. Ipe is a popular wood for decks. It is weather resistant, and turns a silvery color over time. Yuval prefers batu. It is also weather resistant, cheaper than ipe, and has a rich red color. The warm color provides a contrast to the cool colors of our house, and Seattle’s typical cool, cloudy weather.

No deck is complete without a railing — no safe deck, at least. Like the other houses, we chose a slatted design using the batu. The vertical posts are powder-coated steel. Originally we considered stainless steel. Eventually, we decided to use a darker color to match the interior window trim. That helps to make the posts disappear and lets attention be drawn to the view. For similar reasons, we went with a horizontal strip of batu on the top of the railing instead of a cylindrical steel tube.

We’re happy with how the decks and green roof turned out. They are warm, comfortable, and inviting places. We should make good use of both decks (when the weather allows).

Interior flow

Posted on August 20, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

The high level zones of our home were largely determined by our desire to have common areas at the heart. The intimacy gradient and treatment of natural light as well as the general constraints of the site helped determine the more detailed layout.

But the success of a layout turns on how rooms are connected to each other. Today’s post will explore how we approached movement through our home.

The Flow Through Rooms (131)

Problem: The movement between rooms is as important as the rooms themselves; and its arrangement has as much effect on social interaction in the rooms, as the interiors of the rooms.
Therefore: As far as possible, avoid the use of corridors and passages. Instead, use public rooms and common rooms as rooms for movement and for gathering. To do this, place the common rooms to form a chain, or loop, so that it becomes possible to walk from room to room — and so that private rooms open directly off these public rooms. In every case, give this indoor circulation from room to room a feeling of great generosity, passing in a wide and ample loop around the house, with view of fires and great windows.
In our home: The purpose of this pattern is to enhance social interaction. As the pattern describes it,

The possibility of small momentary conversations, gestures, kindnesses, explanations which clear up misunderstandings, jokes and stories is the lifeblood of a human group. If it gets prevented, the group will fall apart as people’s individual relationships go gradually downhill.

To encourage this sort of casual bonding, circulation areas should be used to help connect people to each other in the public parts of the home. Even private areas should not be fully separate from the flow of people.

In our home, the main public areas are on the main floor. Although the bedrooms upstairs and the media room downstairs are fairly isolated from the main floor, both floors are situated to encourage passing through the main floor. The floors are connected by a single open staircase, so moving from one region to another provides social connection.

The image below highlights the circulation pathways on the main floor. They are adjacent to living areas without going through those areas. One particularly interesting — and unintentional — detail is the relationship of the main entry to the stairs. People cannot go from the main entry to the private bedrooms upstairs without making some contact with the common area, but the pathways are generous and tangent enough that that interaction can be as brief or lingering as desired.

Short Passages (132)

Problem: “… long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture.”
Therefore: Keep passages short. Make them as much like rooms as possible with carpets or wood on the floor, furniture, bookshelves, beautiful windows. Make them generous in shape, and always give them plenty of light; the best corridors and passages of all are those which have windows along an entire wall.
In our home: We only have passages in two places: the stairway itself and the upstairs landing. The stairway is fairly long, but the u-shaped path and the open design make the space feel more compact. It has some of the best windows in the house, and we intend to add window seats on the landings.The upstairs landing has more difficulties. To its benefit, it shares the windows from the stairs, is fairly short and generously sized. To its detriment, it has an opening on each of the four sides, making it harder to treat as a room. We should be able to fit some furnishings in the southwest corner of the landing, but that will be made somewhat harder because the door to the south bedrooms is a sliding door mounted on the wall.
In both of these cases, we have passages with potential, but they’ll require care to really become spaces that contribute to the feel of our home rather than detracting from it.

Setsuzokuya is meant to be a home which connects people. By centering the house around a common heart, we hope to achieve that ideal.

Front Door

Posted on August 13, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

The front door doesn’t need to be particularly special for an entry to be successful. It needs to be of good quality; it needs to be visually set apart; but it doesn’t need to be elaborate.

That said, we wanted our front door to be something special. We wanted it to set the tone for the rest of the house: refined, simple, elegant, well designed, natural. Like the other houses in our development, we had our door designed by Christopher Lindsley, a local craftsman (who, with the commission of several dining room tables and a number of other pieces, is quickly becoming the woodworker for our development).

Designing a door is an odd process. Because of the time it takes to create the piece, and because it is nice to have a door on the house by the time you start leaving valuables inside, door design starts before a lot of the other decisions have been made. The door should set the tone of the house, but when we started designing the door, we only had a high level idea of what that tone would be.

Our first concept played upon the L-shape motif that we used on our stair tower. We envisioned something with two L’s in smoky glass in a field of dark and driftwood grey wood. This initial concept had some problems. In addition to not leaving a good spot for a door handle, it felt more geometric than we wanted.

Chris talked us out of this basic concept, but we did like some of the basic ideas: light and dark contrast and a sense of flow and motion. Chris and Yuval worked with us to shape this into a couple of different designs. One, shown below, used a shifting stair step to give a sense of dynamic flow. Another option really built on the “tetris piece” theme of our initial concept and involved a lot of different sized pieces covering the door. Both of these could have been quite striking, but we eventually went a different direction. These ideas were neat, but they didn’t seem quite right. Plus, when it came down to it, finding the right combination of wood to balance the sense of dynamism and simplicity was difficult. Even a single variety of wood has such variety in color and grain that combining that variation with a lot of small pieces became noisy.

We were somewhat stuck at this point. Our second design meeting ended at something of an impasse. Everyone liked different parts of different ideas, but nothing really captured our imagination. Fortunately, before our third meeting, Chris had an inspiration which took our door in a completely different dimension.

Our final design combines a simple but weighty door with a substantial surround and deep casing to evoke (but not slavishly copy) a Japanese temple gateway. The strong horizontal line of the fascia enhances that effect. The crisp but natural design evokes the aesthetic we use throughout the house with the woods providing a preview of the materials that will be encountered inside.

Eventually, the surround will be stained dark to increase the contrast with the door (the sides of the surround already are).

The downside of this design is that we gave up a bit of functionality for aesthetics (in that sense, the door isn’t representative; usually we drop aesthetics before functionality). Notice the complete lack of windows by the entry. Entry windows are great for letting you take a peak out when someone comes by (is it an unwelcome solicitor?). They are also something of a security feature. In the end, we decided it was something we could live without to get the look we desired.

From the inside, the door looks more standard. The white oak door is surrounded by unstained white oak casing and adorned with a simple dark bronze handle. To add more interest, we choose to use a piece of white oak with some personality.

Overall, we are really happy with the way our door turned out. Later, we’ll look at how it fits into the rest of the entry sequence.

Driveway and Hardscaping

Posted on August 6, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

The exterior concrete and aggregate for the house is poured, so the hardscaping is nearly finished. Only a bit of clean-up is left.

Three areas outside the house needed concrete: the entry, the driveway, and the north side of the house (a fairly steep slope shared with our neighbor which needed retaining walls to control erosion).

The relationship between the garage, driveway, and entry was informed by this pattern from A Pattern Language:

Car Connection (113)

Problem: The process of arriving in a house, and leaving it, is fundamental to our daily lives; and very often it involves a car. But the place where cars connect to houses, far from being important and beautiful, is often off to one side and neglected.
Therefore: Place the parking place for the car, and the main entrance, in such a relation to each other, that the shortest route from the parked car into the house, both to the kitchen and to the living rooms, is always through the main entrance. Make the parking place for the car into an actual room which makes a positive and graceful place where the car stands, not just a gap in the terrain.
In our home: It was natural to have the main entry and the garage entry be in the same location. But to really nail this pattern, we chose to forgo any separate garage entry into the house. Whether coming from the garage, driveway, or street, you always come through the same front door. Right now, the driveway is more of a gap in the terrain than a positive and graceful place, but we are going to use landscaping to remedy that (as our neighbors have already started doing to good effect).

On to the details. The driveway was constrained but straightforward. It connects the private drive to the garage. Due to the hill, it slopes downward. We asked for as smooth a transition as possible to accommodate any low-slung sports cars we may own in the future. The top of the driveway curves north a bit to reduce the elevation change. To add interest and break up the linearity, we continued the curves on the south side of the driveway. A strip drain at the bottom of the driveway will catch water from the garage and driveway.

The entry hardscape provides access from the driveway, garage, and street. A landing at the top joins the driveway and the steps from the street. A wide and long set of shallow steps descends to the front door. A second, less grand set of steps leads from the garage side door and stays under cover of a canopy which will keep us dry when going from the garage to the house.

There is a lesson hidden in these stairs: don’t be fooled by false economies. We had poured an earlier concrete foundation before the steps were fully designed. There ended up being a few conflicts between the foundation and the final aggregate. In the end, some chunks of concrete had to be chiseled out, and a few of the foundation walls are still visible. They will be cleaned up and finished a bit more before construction is complete. It might seem easier/cheaper to do something earlier (like pour concrete when the truck is going to be onsite for other work), but doing so before design is complete either constrains your design or forces you to undo a bad decision.

Entry and driveway forms are different than foundation forms. The entry and driveway are wide, thin slabs. The forms are simple boards, with flexible strips forming corners and other curves. The concrete is poured and smoothed, then the top layer is removed to expose the aggregate. This gives a more interesting look and doesn’t show wear as much as smooth concrete would.

The north side of the house looked more like a traditional foundation. This space has the potentia to be a nice area between our house and the neighbor’s, but it is rather steep and, without care, would just be a hazardous hill of dirt. Our initial plan was for concrete retaining walls with an aggregate stairway. It would stabilize the slope, give some area for landscaping, and provide a functional path to the backyards. This work would benefit both homes and straddle the property line, so we agreed to split the cost evenly. It was a lot of excavation and concrete work, however, so we ended up scaling back the original design. The retaining walls were the most important part, so those were completed as-designed. The dirt was backfilled around them to stabilize the slope. Later we will add a pathway, but it will probably be a simpler landscape-style pathway with some gravel and wood treads, instead of a full aggregate path.

Landscaping will go around the hardscape a bit later. Plants and softer, less permanent pathways will be added to connect the sidewalk to the entry landing. Much of the landscaping work can be done after move-in by us as we develop the design and actuality of the landscape. The hardscaping is the messier and more difficult work, and it was valuable to complete it along with the rest of construction.