Historic Adaptation
Crisp as a fall day, this New England home has a new playbook, but an old soul.
This prim home’s symmetrical façade is the spitting image of the Wells Thorn House in Deerfield, Mass., which was built between 1711 and 1780 and is considered one of America’s finest specimens of classical Georgian-style architecture. One might easily mistake the imitator as a superb example of historic preservation, but in fact it was built quite recently with prefabricated “mill-built” components from the Connor Homes factory about seven miles away.
As with all of the builder’s historically inspired homes, the façade maintains a faithful allegiance to the proportions and details of the original, all the way down to its pediments, pilasters, dentils, and 12-over-12 double-hung windows. But the house takes some modern turns inside, trading small rooms for an open plan configuration. The red barn addition is a garage.
“We liken our process to a Hollywood movie set mentality when you’re doing a post-production period film,” says founder and CEO Mike Connor. “Anything you can see on the outside is representative of that former time, but you don’t have to follow tradition all the way through. You can do standard frame or panelized construction in place of post-and-beam and still have the exterior look of an older house.”
Sited in an old-growth apple orchard that is still commercially picked today, the 1,989-square-foot house was built for less than $200 per square foot with prefab rafters, floors, wall systems, and—yes—even trim details. But Connor is quick to point out that it’s skinned in authentic hemlock clapboard and cedar roofing, not composite materials. “We don’t like to stray too far from original building materials,” he explains. “If you start substituting too much, it doesn’t look like the old thing.”
For home buyers who want the best of both worlds, Connor seems to have found a sweet spot. “Historic homes aren’t necessarily big, but they can have a grand presence,” he says. “We’ve found there is a market for those who want a higher level of architectural detail on a smaller footprint.”
Natural Bridge
Rustic yet refined, this site-sensitive outpost isn’t your typical log cabin.
The creek on this three-acre property was not to be disturbed, per neighborhood covenants. That didn’t stop the owner from building the log cabin she’d always wanted. The house straddles 40 feet of creek bed, preserving the land’s natural drainage patterns.
That’s not all that distinguishes this 4,850-square-foot home in a neighborhood of traditional-styled residences with manicured landscaping. Its rustic skin of red tidewater cypress is counterbalanced by large spans of glass—most notably, a double-height window wall that opens onto an 80-foot cantilevered terrace—and its lawn is on the roof, so as not to disrupt the forest floor. Measuring 23 feet wide, the structure’s slim profile spared many trees that would have been felled for a house of squarer proportions. And the few walnut trees that were cleared were locally milled and resurrected as hardwood flooring.
Getting building materials to the site involved some logistical wrangling. The cambered steel beam that spans the creek and supports the patio measures 66 feet long and 30 inches deep, and weighs about 9,000 pounds. “It’s the longest beam the foundry had ever rolled. The load limits over road are usually 60 feet, so we had to get permission to get the extra length over the highway,” explains architect John Senhauser. “On site, we built a temporary bridge as a way to get equipment, people, and materials across the creek. Once the house was built, we disassembled the bridge and sold it.”
Old School
Who says an old building can’t learn some new green tricks? This one is a lesson for the books.
Most adaptive reuse projects score green points simply for repurposing an existing structure instead of tearing it down. This transformation of a vintage schoolhouse into a single-family home did a lot more than that.
Built in the 1880s, the old brick building—which had later been converted into four flats—had plenty of historic characteristics worth preserving. Its ornamental masonry was just the starting point for Sullivan, Goulette & Wilson Architects and builder Crescent Rock. The rest required some digging.
Inside, the team started by exposing original brick walls and timber floor joists that had been covered by plaster and drywall for over a century. Many of the wood joists in the basement and roof had to be replaced with engineered wood trusses to accommodate a more open plan configuration, but the old timbers weren’t trashed. Instead they were planed and planked for reuse in finished millwork, flooring, furniture pieces, and ceiling treatments. “Pretty much any wood you see other than bamboo plywood is salvage that came from inside the original house,” explains architect Jeff Goulette.
To bring more natural light inside, the crew added 14 solar tubes in key spots, as well as four large skylights over the central stair, transforming a dark space into a sunny atrium.
And talk about a sustainable metamorphosis. Proving that old buildings can be retrofitted into energy savers, the 8,500-square-foot home, which now houses a family with five kids, operates with a ground-source heating and cooling system, dual-flush toilets, low-flow plumbing fixtures, Energy Star appliances, a heat recovery ventilator, a drain water heat recovery system, solar thermal domestic hot water, and LED and CFL lighting.
Outside, it sports a green roof covering 50 percent of the total roof area, rainwater collection barrels, and permeable paving. Two hybrid wind turbines work with operable windows to create a whole-house ventilation system that draws hot air up and out.
The icing on the cake is an ingenious little feature in the laundry room, of all places. As part of the larger goal to reduce energy consumption, the architects invented a “radiant drying wall,” which uses radiant heating coils inside the wall to warm more than 200 linear feet of clothes drying racks, thus minimizing dryer use.
Vertical Leap
A lightweight home explores uncharted territory high in the sky.
This 800-square-foot home in Seattle’s Ballard neighbor-hood sits high above a 250-slip marina and enjoys panoramic views of Salmon Bay. But it’s not perched on a hillside as one might expect. Commissioned as a caretaker’s unit for the owner of the marina, it’s built on top of a 62,000-square-foot warehouse.
Weight was the first challenge for builders Steve Mann and Scott Chenoweth, since warehouse roofs generally are not built to be load-bearing. To ensure the structural integrity of the “lot,” the team had to run three new columns through the warehouse, with pin-pile footers under each column buried 70 to 90 feet deep in the ground.
“It’s essentially like three toothpicks making a teepee shape down into grade, with a concrete pile cap on top,” explains lead architect Scott Wolf, a partner with The Miller|Hull Partnership. The structural gymnastics alone cost about $200,000.
The house itself is a simple 20-foot-by-40-foot box clad in light-gauge metal and glass with a 500-square-foot wraparound deck. The plan is divided into two parallel bars (living spaces on one side and utilitarian areas on the other), separated by a 40-foot spine wall of built-in shelves and cabinets.
Could industrial rooftops represent the next housing frontier? Wolf thought the idea was at least worth exploring.
“Millions of square feet of warehouse roofs exist in our cities, and most of them are occupied by pigeons,” he says. “The zoning code here allowed only one unit and restricted its size, so you couldn’t build 50 units up there and solve a housing need. But warehouses do offer great views for quirky projects like this one. It’s fun to think about what is possible if we look at these forgotten landscapes as new opportunities.”