Contemporary additions to post-and-beam prow home
Already a unique home, the owners wanted to add a one-story Family Room addition to the walkout basement level of this Lindal cedar residence. They also wanted to enlarge the grilling deck, and add a roof over it and the front entry deck.
The photo below is what I had to work with. Note how the walls at this prow end are actually angled toward the center. This made the design all that more challenging:
There were two primary factors that drove the addition design. The first was keeping the view from the first floor great room. It's an amazing, envy-inducing view of rolling farmland with trees in the distance. But a new roof below the windows wouldn't have looked good as a flat roof, and the clients needed a big addition which requires a big roof. The solution? A dual-pitch roof over the addition meant that the addition roofline would mimic the home's roofline, and the first floor windows would only have to be shortened a bit, not eliminated. (The patio door you can see here wasn't necessary, so we replaced it with a window too.)
The second challenge was how to put roofs over the decks that look as if they belong on the house. I couldn't just extend the existing roof slopes, because then there wouldn't be enough headroom at the deck steps. And the clients didn't like the idea of reverse gables (and neither did I, really). So, thinking outside of the box, I designed the shed roofs to be free-standing above the original roof slopes, parallel to them. The clients love this industrial, unconventional design.
The client plans on completing a bunch of the finish work herself, but has promised that once she's done, I can come back and take some better "After" photos.
