patterns – Page 2 – 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.

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.

Flooring

Posted on July 23, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

Floors are an unavoidable fact of life in this gravity conquered world. It seems to be little more than an expanse of necessary eye candy. But flooring can have as much impact on the feel of a home as any other element.

And, of course, A Pattern Language has a pattern to capture the approach we should take with flooring.

Floor Surface (233):

Problem: We want the floor to be comfortable, warm to the touch, inviting. But we also want it to be hard enough to resist wear, and easy to clean.
Therefore: Zone the house, or building, into two kinds of zones: public zones, and private or more intimate zones. Use hard materials like waxed, red polished concrete, tiles, or hardwood in the public zones. In the more intimate zone, use an underfloor of soft materials, like felt, cheap nylon carpet, or straw matting, and cover it with cloths, and pillows, and carpets, and tapestries. Make a clearly marked edge between the two — perhaps even a step — so that people can take their shoes off when they pass from the public to the intimate.

This ties in closely to…

Intimacy Gradient (127):

Problem: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence, which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.
Therefore: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

In our house, the entrance and main level are public spaces. The lower level is semi-public, the upstairs landing and laundry room are semi-private, and the bedrooms are the most private spaces. Combining that with the flooring guidelines led us to

Hardwood for the main level and all the stair landings: these public and semi-private spaces need durable flooring
Tile for the entrance and the wet areas (laundry room, full bathrooms): these areas take the hardest and dirtiest wear
Carpet for the bedrooms: the softness of the materials provides comfort and emphasizes their private nature

The media room is a bit of an exception. Its status as a semi-public space might suggest hardwood. However, since sound reflection is something that needs to be controlled, we will use carpet. The office and powder room on the main floor are not technically public spaces, either, but hardwood is a reasonable choice for them because of their adjacency to the public areas and the way they are used.

Flooring in depth

Hardwood

Hardwood dominates our floors. Its pervasive presence makes a major contribution to the character of our home. Because of this, we spent a lot of time making our choice. The obvious consideration is the type and color of the wood, but there are other aspects to consider.

Structure
The first consideration is wood structure. Solid hardwood is what it sounds like: each board is a single solid piece. Engineered hardwood is made of several layers: a top layer of the desired wood above a few layers of a manufactured wood product such as particle board or plywood.

Solid wood flooring can be completely sanded and refinished 5-7 times, since the wood is the same all the way down. Engineered flooring has a thinner layer of the surface wood; the better products can handle 3-5 sandings. Engineered flooring is much more stable. Wood expands and contracts based on temperature and humidity. The several layers in an engineered plank mitigate this by expanding/contracting at different rates. This allows for the use of wider, tightly seamed planks.

This choice was easy: we decided to go with engineered wood. Our builder recommended it, and the stability and precision of the boards was appealing. The wear layer is 1/4″, which is on the thicker end for engineered flooring, and the refinishable layer of solid wood (before the tounge & groove and nails become visible) isn’t necessarily much thicker.

Finish
The second consideration is finish. We considered polyurethane coat and oil finish. A poly coat is basically a liquid plastic that coats the floor. It completely covers and protects the wood, and leaves a smooth, glossy finish. It needs little maintenance, can be mopped, and gives a much glossier look. The disadvantage is that the poly coat will collect noticeable scratches over time, and cannot easily be spot-repaired: a large section (up to the entire room) has to be refinished to keep the coat consistent. In contrast, an oil finish gives a more natural look to the wood and allows spot-repairs. The disadvantage is that it requires an annual application of oil and requires more care when cleaning it. A big difference from polyurethane is that an oil finish does not create a barrier, and so the wood will acquire more wear (including stains) over time.

This was a tougher decision. We weren’t attracted to the poly coat finishes. It doesn’t fit the natural look we want on the main level, and the propensity to show scratches was not appealing. While a yearly re-oil of the all the wood floor is far from ideal, we were attracted to the natural aging gained by an oil finished floor. We like materials that age gracefully, and having a floor that will accept changes fits that desire.

Yuval recommended Navarre Oiled Floors. They are wide-plank, thick-veneered, engineered, oil-finished hardwoods. We wanted something fairly subtle so that it wouldn’t overwhelm the room. We eliminated the options that were too red, too yellow, too dark, or too busy (mainly in the exotic woods). We ended up going with Montauban, a nice white oak.

Hardwood is installed fairly early in the finishing process so that cabinets, trim, etc. can be installed on top. But it is more easily damaged than tile, so it needs to protected during the rest of construction. They ended up using the boxes that the flooring came in to protect the floor. They are taped down (with painter’s tape) so they don’t slide around, and the edges are left clear for trim installation. I thought it was a clever solution.

Tile

Keeping to the theme of natural-looking materials, we decided to use a stone-look tile throughout. In the bathrooms a bit of texture will help to prevent the floor from getting too slippery when wet. Many of the tiles we looked at can be used outside, which would allow us to unify the interior and exterior portions of the entry with the same flooring. Yuval recommended Ecotech tiles, which we really liked. We settled on the Ecogreen in the structured (rougher) finish for all the tiled floors in the house.

Carpet

Carpet is installed at the end of construction to prevent unnecessary wear or damage. We have just started looking at products and colors. We will probably choose a light- to medium-grey color for the carpets in the bedrooms. It should be fairly neutral, and work well with dark woods (in the master suite), and whatever paint colors we use in the second bedrooms. The media room will take a darker color, possibly something similar to the Bordeaux color from our color palette.

The media room will use a fairly dense carpet that will wear better, but isn’t quite as cushy. The bedrooms should have less traffic, so we will use something a bit plusher and more comfortable on the feet. Yuval suggested a couple simple nylon green carpets: Americana (denser) and Mica (plusher), both from Masland. We are also looking at Karastan SmartStrand carpets, which are an interesting green carpet made from corn. As novice fiber nerds, we were required to look briefly at wool carpets. These are generally considered green, but are more expensive, not as plush, and are generally looped carpets (less good with clawed critters).

Conclusion

Despite having only three types of flooring, a lot of effort has gone into choosing exactly the right material and style for each portion of the house. It needs to fit the intimacy gradient, be appropriate for the amount and type of wear, and give the appropriate character to each room.

With the majority of the flooring installed, we are pleased with our choices. Having flooring goes a long way toward making our building feel like a real house and really starts to give a sense for how nice of a space it will be.

Building envelope: Windows

Posted on July 16, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

Windows are one of the most important parts of the building envelope. Despite the effectiveness of modern artificial lighting, a room that has no windows feels dead and uncomfortable. Windows bring a room to life by bringing in natural light and connecting people to the world outside.

Natural Light

When available, natural light beats artificial light. It is generally brighter. Even on a cloudy day, outside will be brighter than your average living room. Natural light is dynamic — it changes throughout the day and throughout the year. This gives life to a ream that static artificial lighting cannot.

Our home has a great amount of natural light. With no artificial illumination, the light is better — brighter and more even — than in our temporary living space.

Wings of Light (107):

Problem: Modern buildings are often shaped with no concern for natural light — they depend almost entirely on artificial light. But buildings which displace natural light as the major source of illumination are not fit places to spend the day.
Therefore: Arrange each building so that it breaks down into wings which correspond, approximately, to the most important natural social groups within the building. Make each wing long and as narrow as you can — never more than 25 feet wide.
Our house is not long and narrow — in fact, its main body is a square. Each side of the square is 32′ long. Thus, we are violating the letter of the law. But how do we rank against the spirit?The reason for the 25′ width restriction is that in an average room, significant amounts of light only penetrate about 12′ from the window. A 25′ wing with windows on both sides will just barely get enough light.
Fortunately, our home uses several techniques to allow above average light penetration. Our ceiling is 10′ high, and the main windows in the living room go all the way to the ceiling. Walls are mostly white. These factors together allow more light to go in further and reflect effectively. As the picture below shows, this results in a living space that can be illuminated primarily by natural light.

Natural light on the main floor

Indoor sunlight (128):

Problem: If the right rooms are facing south, a house is bright and sunny and cheerful; if the wrong rooms are facing south, the house is dark and gloomy.
Therefore: Place the most important rooms along the south edge of the building, and spread the building out along the east-west axis. Fine tune the arrangement so that the proper rooms are exposed to the south-east and the south-west sun. For example: give the common area a full southern exposure, bedrooms south-east, porch south-west. For most climates, this means the shape of the building is elongated east-west.
In our home: We have a great southern exposure. We took advantage of this by making sure the southern wall of our main floor has a lot of windows. Because we have an open floor plan, we are able to get large amounts of natural light even with a fairly square building layout. The picture above looks from our living room toward the kitchen. The window nearest the back corner of the kitchen is about 27′ feet away, but it is still well illuminated — and we haven’t even taken the protective films off of the windows yet.

Light on two sides of every room (159):

- Problem: When people have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

- Therefore: Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.
- In our home: Having windows on multiple sides evens out the light. If light only comes from one window, there will be a high contrast between the window and its surroundings. Most of our primary rooms have windows on two sides. (See the floor plans below.)However, since our home doesn’t have crinkly edges (they are not energy, material, or labor efficient), we could not achieve this everywhere. For the most part, the impact of this was minimized by putting rooms that aren’t as important in the non-corner positions. Where non-utility rooms have ended up with windows on one side, we are able to mitigate issues by using glass doors to help borrow light from other rooms.

Light on two sides of the living room

Upstairs windows.
Yellow arrows highlight windows.

Main floor windows.Yellow arrows highlight windows.

Views

The primary views from our home are to the west. In the background, we have a view of the Cascade mountains sitting above a view of the not-so-lovely Factoria mall. In the mid-ground, we see a lot of trees with some limited views of our neighbors to the sides. Overall, it’s a pretty good view, and something to take advantage of.

Looking west from the living room deck

Panorama looking west from the living room deck

Panorama looking west from the master bedroom

Zen view (134):

Problem: The archetypal zen view occurs in a famous Japanese house, which gives this pattern its name. [A Buddhist monk has a beautiful view, but it is only seen in passing as you enter the home.]
Therefore: If there is a beautiful view, don’t spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition — along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms. If the view window is correctly placed, people will see a glimpse of a distant view as they come up to the window or pass it: but the view is never visible from places where people stay.
In our home: We mostly failed to achieve any Zen views. Our windows, especially in the living room and bedrooms are large to let in the light, but they make for gaping views. To some degree, this was unavoidable — the views and the light were coming from the same direction.However, we did manage to apply a little of this philosophy in our stairway. We intentionally placed our stairway to the west. This cuts off some of the western view from the main living spaces. Instead of having big gaping windows in the stair tower, we choose to use multiple smaller windows. These break up the view, and because they are smaller the view shifts as you use the stairs. This gives the view a bit of mystery and dynamism that it would have lacked if we’d made the more predictable decision of having the west wall given over to view with the stairs pushed to an interior wall where they wouldn’t effect the view.

Breaking up the view with smaller windows

Windows overlooking life (192):

Problem: Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them.
Therefore: In each room, place the windows in such a way that their total area conforms roughly to the appropriate figures for your region…, and place them in positions which give the best possible views out over life: activities in streets, quiet gardens, anything different from the indoor scene.
In our home: A challenge of our site is that it is fairly heavily slopped. The second picture below is taken from our main floor — ground level on the entry side but, as the picture shows, rather high by the time you get to the other end of the building. Thus, all the life we look out on is rather distant.But almost every window, expect those on the north facing the neighboring house, are fortunate enough to have a view of the nearby trees and, eventually, our gardens.

The main floor is rather far above the ground

Building Envelope: Ceilings and Roofs

Posted on May 31, 2012June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

In this post, we’ll explore how patterns influenced our building envelope, focusing primarily on ceilings and the roof. (As before, problem descriptions and solutions — the first two bullet points of each section — are from A Pattern Language.)

Sheltering roof (117):

Problem: The roof plays a primal role in our lives. The most primitive buildings are nothing but a roof. If the roof is hidden, if its presence cannot be felt around the building or if it cannot be used, then people will lack a fundamental sense of shelter.
Therefore: Slope the roof or make a vault of it, make its entire surface visible, and bring the eaves of the roof down low, as low as 6’0″ or 6’6″ at places like the entrance, where people pause. Build the top story of each wing right into the roof, so that the roof does not only cover it, but actually surrounds it.
In our home: It would be an understatement to say that modern-styling does not lend themselves to this pattern. So we asked ourselves, “What is the essence of this pattern?”Patterns of Home, a modernized look at some of the home oriented patterns in A Pattern Language, gives a clue. The roof should, above all, provide a sense of shelter. It should provide a sense of connection between the inside and the outside. A Pattern Language focuses on achieving this via living space within the roof, but another way to achieve this is to have the same roof surface expressed inside and out.
Our home has two roof lines — the top and a midline. Both are true roof surfaces in that they cover interior space that is not covered by the other. Both roof lines are expressed inside and outside the house. The lower roof line defines both an exterior midline and the maximum ceiling height on the main floor. The butterfly shape of the upper roof is also expressed inside; most of the rooms upstairs have a slanted roof that continues the external expression of the butterfly roof.

Equally important is the sense of indoor/outdoor transition that our roof gives at two key locations, both shown below. The picture on the lower left shows how the roof itself provides protection over our upstairs deck. The picture on the lower right shows the same sense of protection over the main entry (and as the top picture shows, the sense of that protection being part of the roof is even greater now that the roof trim has been installed).

In retrospect, I would have tweaked the roof design a bit to give it a greater sense of shelter, even within the confines of a butterfly roof. The mid-line roof does not shelter the main floor deck as effectively as it does the entry, and it does not continue on the north side or fully around the west side. Not continuing the middle roof line all the way around weakened the sense of the roof really being part of the home. However, from the east and south sides, we did pretty well considering the inherent limitations of the style we had settled on.

Ceiling height variety (190):

- Problem: A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people feel comfortable.
- Therefore: Vary the ceiling heights continuously throughout the building, especially between rooms which open into each other, so that the relative intimacy of different spaces can be felt. In particular, make ceilings high in rooms which are public or meant for large gatherings (10 to 12 feet), lower in rooms for smaller gatherings (7 to 9 feet), and very low in rooms or alcoves for one or two people (6 to 7 feet).
- In our home: I would say that we achieved the minimum viable amount of ceiling height variety needed to say that we have variety. Much to my sadness, we don’t have any nooks or alcoves which take advantage of a lowered ceiling to make them feel cozier. However, we do do use ceiling height to provide social cues and, on occasion, to give a sense of grandeur.The main floor has 10′ ceilings. This is high, but anything lower would feel low in this broad, open space. To keep this area from feeling cavernous and undifferentiated, we vary the ceiling height. The entry is raised above the main floor. This gives a sense of compression and expansion that emphasizes the height of the main living area. The area over the kitchen is soffited down to differentiate that space from the dining area adjacent to it (the diagram below shows the kitchen soffit, but that only goes part way across the ceiling). The living room has a support beam which provides a natural gateway separating that space.
  
  The bedrooms have a lower 8′ ceiling height to match their more intimate scale. To give a sense of the roof from the inside, all of the bedrooms have a ceiling line which follows the butterfly roof. This, along with window placement, gives a feeling of opening the rooms to the view outside.
  
  The most dramatic use of ceiling height variety is in our stair tower. The stair tower stretches the whole height of the building, and the open tread stairs really allow you to get a sense of the height of the structure. The picture below, which shows the upper 1.5 stories of the stair tower, gives a feel for the sense of height it brings to our home.

The next post will cover openings in the building envelope for windows and doors.

Site Layout

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

Patterns made relatively few contributions to our general site layout. The shape of our lot, its relation to the street and utilities, and the setbacks and easements imposed by the city combined to make the placing of our house fairly obvious: our house would be at the east end of a long east/west oriented lot. Fortunately, these constraints ended up being fairly consistent with what we wanted out of the site layout patterns. (As before, problem descriptions and solutions — the first two bullet points of each section — are from A Pattern Language.)

Site repair (104):

Problem: Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.
Therefore: On no account place the buildings in the places which are most beautiful. If fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.
For our home: The site naturally lent itself to fulfilling this pattern. Our lot is one portion of what was once a larger lot. The east side of our property had been disturbed by the construction of two new homes to the north. The west side is mostly wooded and partially a buffer zone for a nearby critical slope. Based on these constraints, it was natural to leave the wooded area intact and build on the disturbed land.

South facing outdoors (105):

Problem: People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn’t, in all but desert climates.
Therefore: Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go with them, and keep the outdoor spaces to the south. Never leave a deep band of shade between the building and the sunny part of the outdoors.
In our home: Our site is long east-west and short north-south, so we do not have a lot of flexibility for north/south siting. Part of the southern side of the property is taken by easements for a pedestrian path and for utilities. We have trees along the south western edge of our property, which decreases the amount of sunlight available. Despite the difficulties, we still have a sunny front yard in the east and a backyard in the west filled with tree-filtered sunlight. Neither requires going through deeply shaded areas for access. The shaded north side will be a terraced path down to the back yard.

Main entrance (110):

Problem: Placing the main entrance (or main entrances) is perhaps the single most important step you take during the evolution of a building plan.
Therefore: Place the main entrance of the building at a point where it can be seen immediately from the main avenues of approach and give it a bold, visible shape which stands out in front of the building.
In our home: The location of the main entry was constrained by where we could put the garage (only on the north side). The garage also causes the entry to be nestled in instead of standing out in front of the building. We adapted to this difficulty and the site’s natural elevation change by adding a large, bold stairway down to the front door. This extends the entry out so that it can be seen from all three approaches (driveway, sidewalk, and pedestrian path).

Entrance transition (112):

Problem: Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.
Therefore: Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.
In our home: The design and placement of the entry were a good start for this pattern. The entry stairs (on the left in the image below) provide a natural change of level, material, and view. However, we need to make sure that this connects to all of the approaches. To aid in this, we are planning on adding some stairs from the sidewalk to the entry. These will provide a connection and allow us to add landscaping to further emphasize the sense of transition.

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: This pattern had a large influence on the design of our entry sequence. This pattern and past experience convinced us that we really didn’t want to have multiple main entries into the home. We decided to just have one — there isn’t even a door directly inside from the garage. The driveway, garage, and other approaches all funnel into the single (covered) entry. Architecturally, the car connection is not a positive place (i.e., enclosed on multiple sides). however, we are planning on using garden features to give it a feel of enclosure.

Next up in out pattern posts will be a discussion of the patterns that influenced our building envelope.

Our pattern language: Zones

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

Once upon a time, we spoke of how we narrowed down the 253 patterns in A Pattern Language down to the ~70 that we felt were most relevant to our home. Today we want to go into more detail about those patterns, starting with the “big moves”, those patterns that underlie our sense of place.

Our home begins with

House for a small family (76):

Problem: In a house for a small family, it is the relationship between children and adults which is most critical.
Therefore: Give the house three distinct parts: a realm for the parents, a realm for the children, and a common area. Conceive these three realms as roughly similar in size, with the commons the largest.^[1]

This overarching pattern leads naturally to three others: Common areas at the heart, Couple’s realm, and Children’s realm.

Common areas at the heart (129):

Problem: No social group — whether a family, a work group, or a school group — can survive without constant informal contact among its members.
Therefore: Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies, and in such a way that the paths which go in and out of the building lie tangent to it.
In our home: Our open great room acts as the heart of our home. It lies tangent to the main entry (on the right, below) and, less directly, to the back entry (at the bottom of the stairs to the left). We have other shared spaces, but this one is truly the heart of the home.

Common areas at the heart of our main floor

Couple’s realm (136):

Problem: The presence of children in a family often destroys the closeness and the special privacy which a man and wife need together.^[2]
Therefore: Make a special part of the house distinct from the common areas and all the children’s rooms, where the man and woman of the house can be together in private. Give this place a quick path to the children’s rooms, but, at all costs, make it a distinctly separate realm.
In our home: The couple’s realm is a distinct space from the rest of the home. It’s more than just a bedroom — our realm is meant to be an area where we can comfortably spend time alone together. It is directly across the hall from the children’s realm, making that realm distinct but accessible.

Couple’s realm and Children’s realm upstairs

Children’s realm (137):

Problem: If children do not have space to release a tremendous amount of energy when they need to, they will drive themselves and everybody else in the family up the wall.
Therefore: Start by placing the small area which will belong entirely to the children — the cluster of their beds. Place it in a separate position toward the back of the house, and in such a way that a continuous play space can made from this cluster to the street, almost like a wide swath inside the house, muddy, toys strewn along the way, touching those family rooms which children need — the bathroom and the kitchen most of all — passing the common area along one side (but leaving quiet sitting areas and the couple’s realm entirely separate and inviolate), reaching out to the street, either through its own door or through the entrace room, and ending in an outdoor room, connected to the street, and sheltered, and large enough so that the children can play in it when it rains, yet still be outdoors.
In our home: This is a detailed pattern. We took what was most important to us. The children’s realm is a distinctly separate space. It does have access to the outdoors without cutting through the common space (by the stairs and back door), but, since that path uses the common stair case, the access itself is only weakly part of the children’s realm.

These patterns describe the defining zones of our home. In the next post, we’ll look at some structures that define the physical layout of our home.

^[1] All of the patterns in have the form: context; problem statement; discussion; conclusion; related patterns. Our pattern posts will have just the problem statement and conclusion; we refer you to the book for the rest

^[2] Yes, this book, published in 1977, is full of heteronormative assumptions. Just try to ignore them.

Our pattern language

Posted on November 1, 2010June 18, 2023 by ErikaRS

For once, I (Erika) am writing a post.

A Pattern Language provides the classic reference for defining the qualities that make buildings work and houses homey. My own sense of what I want from a home developed largely from reading and rereading this book. The book is massive; it contains 253 patterns which can be used to define everything from an entire geographic region to a corner of a room. Such complexity seems overwhelming, but fortunately the authors provide a way to get started. In the words of the book:

[E]ach part of the environment is given character by the collection of patterns which we choose to build into it. The character of what you build, will be given to it by the language of patterns you use, to generate it.

For this reason, of course, the ask of choosing a language for your project is fundamental. The pattern language we have given here contains 253 patterns. You can therefore use it to generate an almost unimaginably large number of possible different smaller languages, for all the different projects you may choose to do, simply by picking patterns from it.

To generate your own pattern language, A Pattern Language, suggests the following steps:

First, find the pattern which best describes the overall scope of your project. We chose pattern 76, “House for a small family”
Turn to the starting pattern and read it. Add the patterns mentioned at the end and any other interesting patterns mentioned and add them to your list of candidate patterns.
Repeat step two until all of the connected patterns have been read.
Remove any patterns you aren’t sure about. The list of patterns can easily get too long. We ended up pruning over 30 patterns from our initial list.
Add your own materials. If there are things you want to include that aren’t captured by patterns in the book, add them.
Change any patterns that you want so that they are appropriate for your situation and desires. Change the name of the pattern so that it captures your changes clearly.

We have gone through all but the last two steps. In a future post, we will talk more about the patterns that make up our personal pattern language.