Next time you're looking to hire house builders, ask 'em whether the house they're going to build for you will be with the same or better quality materials and methods as they'd use for their own house . . . and watch 'em wiggle. Before The Architect
INTRODUCTION
When this house designer first saw this Blue Ridge hill country house picture and its companions, he wrote back that if he was pagan, he'd feel sorry for the place. Upgrade?
Before The Architect took on this one for its world-class blah.
The Cherished Before" Pic
HOME DESIGN UPGRADE CHALLENGES
Included among existing house design upgrade challenges
High shed ridge to front wall, set high to get the biggest frame of view out to a beautiful mountain valley
Low-slope to roof with relatively short L2
No character of any sort in our opinion
Hard to gain a focus
A slab on which we were to fit a 2-vehicle garage with habitable above
Forbidding stairway
Not immediately drawn to main entry
Squinty windows on L2
THE HOME DESIGN UPGRADE
Here's where we ended for an Elevation to Front Of House . . . .
The Humongo Upgrade Pic, Elevation
The essentials to this home design upgrade:
Leave as much existing structure intact nearly 100% success
Flood the interior with light in both existing and addition
Tougher in existing what with
The L1 porch overhang and
The short ceiling and dinky wall space on L2
Suggest an older sense of style to existing in western North Carolina hill country
Wed the addition
Respectful of Classical style, to resonate the older main house
Maintain main house focality
Well present the main entry - easily recognizable, welcoming
Before The Architect replies to this hill country house design upgrade challenge
Leave the roof lines as is, dealing with consequential short wall face above the shed ridge by
Applying roof dormers of a particular design
To define an L2 as something more than a loft
Add more daylight with bigger windows
Get the interior of L2 a little headroomier by framing them in the valley rafter method.
To add character, especially grouped and smallish.
For more character, we went to
Classical design with
Overdoor features
Overwindow features
Comment: Neither the first nor the last time we're presented with an opportunity to formalize a look with Classical architecture aspects, one must play with the options until visual satisfaction comes fully around - appropriate to the facade and site and setting, functionally useful, proportionate, balanced, generally symmetrical, clarity of functional expression, etc.
Since front-facing doors could become visually conflictive, confusing, we slightly overdid the main entry lest doubts arise about its identity.
The addition over the existing slab-on-grade is meant to look a bit newer than the main house itself and still belong.
Even though the addition appears more massive than the house, there's no doubt which is which -
Keeping the garage vehicle doors down lower in elevation from the main entry helped a lot.
So did
Setting the addition back from the newly enclosed front porch
Running a portico, front-facing gable and columns forward of the main entry
The front-facing stairs mend new and existing
The addition's bigger shutters distinguish not the new but the old
While both new and existing are symmetrical, existing distinctively trumps
. . . . . . . . .
The new interior gained a great space especially in lines of sight and openness majorly from the newly enclosed front porch area. While we had at least one final, crucial (in our minds) benefit of interior design to bring to our work, clients were satisfied with our achievements to that point and (sadly, to our reckoning) did not take us up on further substantial opening of the interior to both lines of sight and travel patterns.
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