porch Archives - Rural Studio

Déjà vu? The Patriece’s Home team stumbled and waddled into reviews on Friday dressed as the Perry Lakes Park Restrooms and Boardwalk, a 2003 Rural Studio project in Marion, Alabama.

Halloween reviews is the time of year when the team presents (in costume) to a mix of outside reviewers. This critical feedback brings the insight needed to push the project design to the next stage of development.

Aside from crafting stylish bathrooms from cardboard and duct tape, the team received and did inventory on their tool trailer. Most importantly the Patriece’s Home team has been hard at work analyzing plan options and room relationships that make a buildable, beautiful, and adaptable home.

This set of iterations was focused on what has been called pivot points, or design-driving decisions, such as porch type and house orientation. With so many options and variables, these decisions allowed the team to test and compare multiple different approaches to designing a multi-generational home.

In addition to parsing through pending plans and pivot points, the team worked with the other two 5th-year student teams to build and refine a presentation for reviews, and it wouldn’t be Halloween week without a few necessary breaks for pumpkin-carving!

Halloween reviews were extremely helpful for the team. The reviewers gave insight about how the stairs can be expressive on the home’s exterior, better utilized, and how the potential second unit in the home could be on the first floor. Wait and see where the Patriece’s Home team takes these ideas next!

A selfie of Adam, Lauren, Laurel, and Daniel

Howdy from the freshly established Patriece’s Home team: Adam Davis, Lauren Lovell, Daniel Burton, and Laurel Holloway! While the team has not met their client, Patriece, yet, they have been diligently working on Rural Studio’s next 5th-year house project.

Rural Studio has been designing and building homes for rural families since 1993. Patriece’s Home seeks to provide flexibility and adaptability for rural homeowners as the number of occupants and their relationships change over the life of the home. Often in rural areas, as homes are inherited and families grow, porches are filled in, and additions are added to provide more interior space.

Written Diagram. Adaptability = One defined space that changes in defined program. That change can be called flexibility.

The goal of Patriece’s Home is to make the interior rooms flexible enough that they can easily and completely change without significant alterations or additions to the home. Building upon research from one of last year’s 5th-year projects, the Myers’ Home, this new project will also provide more occupiable interior space in the attic. By extending the interior upwards, the footprint remains the same, the cost per square foot of the home is decreased, and the details of exterior additions don’t lead to thermally weak points, leaky places within the home envelope.

The team is also considering the option of an exterior stair that allows for the second floor attic space to be separated from the first floor. This offers opportunities for the home to have two separate families under the same roof or additional space for the homeowner to rent, providing potential for a second source of income.

To understand the limits and possibilities of an interior stair, the team first dove into residential code analysis for interior stairs. Next they drew stair and attic truss schemes into several previous Rural Studio house designs to challenge what restrictions and possibilities come with a two-story house. This research combined with the drawing exercises helped the team develop new criteria for the project.

Halloween reviews are right around the corner and the team will begin to mock-up and understand what makes a delightful Rural Studio porch and the kind of spatial challenges a staircase offers. So, come along and porch sit with this team as they keep this project moving on up (into the attic)!

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