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.
The homeowners bought this timber-framed stone and chestnut one-story home on Deep Creek Lake as their weekend retreat. Former owners had carved two very small bedrooms out of the main level footprint, but my clients wanted to add to the home in order to host groups of friends on the weekend. I designed an addition with a large master suite on the main level, and two bedrooms with a shared bath on the lower level. The first challenge was figuring out how to fit the addition on the lot due to steep grade and a small building envelope. Second challenge was how to design the roof geometry so that the connecting roof didn't overshoot the main house's ridge line.
Now that the addition is completed, the owners will remove the original small bedrooms facing the lake, and relocate the tiny kitchen from the road side of the home (the twin windows in the photo above are over the existing kitchen sink) to the lake side.
I am about to begin another addition which will connect to the other side of the original home. They need a foyer/mudroom entry, another basement bedroom, an oversized garage, and a guest suite over the garage. I plan on repeating the materials and proportions of the master suite bedroom in this new phase.
Pretty much the ultimate compliment I can hope for is that past clients will hire me again for their next project. I designed new interior and exterior spaces to this home a few years ago. Just about the only area left to update was the owners' bath. Exterior steps and an existing basement bathroom window limited the width and depth of the addition, but I still managed to get a Jacuzzi tub and Spark Slim 46 fireplace in there, along with lots of windows, skylights, and a cathedral ceiling.
The owners were very involved in this job and worked closely with an interior designer at Porcelanosa in Rockville, their source for the tiles and the cabinetry. This is a truly spectacular space; I am grateful for the opportunity to work with clients who let me be so creative with the design.
