stairhome

Where Do We Stair-t?

Patriece’s Home team was busy over their winter break continuing to work on their adaptable, two-story house intended for multi-generational residents. With some insightful feedback from Soup Roast, Rural Studio’s final fall review event, the design has been rigorously refined and tested over the past month to make the home more easily adaptable. The laundry room in the house now has two potential locations, so it is accessible whether the home is used as one unit or two. The team has also begun drawing the home’s interior elevations to evaluate how comfortable the rooms are to live in, to determine the exact best placement of windows, and discover opportunities for storage in underutilized spaces. 

They have also gotten an early jump on engineering their attic trusses. The team’s design will use an existing bearing wall to decrease the lumber size of the trusses’ bottom chord.

Additionally, the team has begun drawing their construction documents and developing a slight roof overhang to protect the home’s windows from the wash of roof water. 

Last week the group had a review with John Forney, an architect and friend of the Studio based out of Birmingham, AL, that allowed them to prove that their research is relevant by using “scenario buffering” to scheme all of the possible adaptations for this house. 

In the next couple of weeks, the team will also make decisions on materials to begin drawings their details. They plan to meet with their client Patrice to learn how this home might actually be lived in and placed on the site. The team can’t wait!

Also, due to the upcoming weekly guest reviews, February will be full of old friends of the Studio as well as new faces! We’re excited to see everyone!

Ingredients for Stair Soup

Patriece’s Home has been diligently refining their plans (and sections and perspectives) to decide what scheme of a closable adaptable unit in a home works best. The team affectionately renamed their shotgun scheme to the “Hotdog” and the wrapping scheme to the “Hamburger,” and it was apparent before reviews began that the Hamburger scheme is what the team wants to continue with! 

The Hamburger has a corner porch that is an easier approach to place on a variety of sites while also condensing its main circulation in one path through the home’s center. The team has also taken the Myers’ Home team’s approach to rooms without names and applied it to their own definition of adaptability. Now the team is designing rooms that change names, so some living and bedrooms that are easy to rearrange without demolition or constructing immovable fixtures are designed so they can comfortably flip their program as the homeowner needs. 

A plan view of the team's hamburger scheme shows landscaping leading to a gable end approach. A closed door in the center of the plan shows the ground floor can be separated into two halves.

On the Tuesday of Soup Roast, the reviewers discussed the nuances of how the home will be used and pointed out to the team where their project could use some development. And to be even more helpful, the reviewers stayed in Newbern to do a workshop with the team. They got into the details of how eaves (or no eaves) could be detailed, the successes of the dormer, and encourage the team to get a closer view of their design by drawing all the interior elevations of the building. 

As the team continues to work through the Christmas break, come back in 2022 to see them jump into finer details of the project!