The Loft Home is the second house designed and built in the 2008 North Ward lineup. It explores the idea of a compact, two-story house plan to minimize the building’s footprint. The home was designed with the living and service spaces on the ground floor with a loft, stowed over the kitchen and bathroom, to be used as a bedroom, effectively doubling the volume of the living space.
All of the interior of the house—the floors, walls, and roof—was built using metal studs, which are lighter than wood framing and can be ordered to specific length, meaning that they have greater overall flexibility. The lightweight metal framing meant that the walls could be built to full height and still be lifted into place by a team of four people—the average size of student project teams. Like the Pattern Book Home (another North Ward home), the exterior was built with a cedar rainscreen cladding to add protection from moisture. However, the Loft Home’s rainscreen was built in combination with fiber cement planks, and the resulting exterior acts to articulate the loft space within.
