Seaside House renderings

We explore materials and texture on the house The owner was interested in turning the exterior over to stucco. I wanted to add another layer of texture that broke down the scale of the large surfaces, and also reveal something about what was an addition and what was existing. A friend, Jeff Jacobs, ran the modeler through rendering software he was experimenting with. He is a master with several different rendering packages. Sunset at the beach.

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Small addition, second scheme

Adding the deck back in, and trying a different roof line. The input from the first scheme was that the upper level balcony was really desired. This dictated opening up the existing bedroom windows to doors. As far as the roofline, while it was worked into the new composition the feeling was that the image of the old house roofline was still too strong and they wanted it to go away! This feedback led to the development of a new scheme, shown here: Now the existing roof line is hidden behind a new fascia, the roof slope of the new master bedroom turned to match up with the new fascia. The existing roof line still exists behind so we still manage to avoid reframing the existing roof, but the house turns a completely new facade to the street And yes, that is the existing attic vent worked into the new composition! This is still a rough massing model which will need further development.

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Small addition, first scheme

The first sketch proposal for the addition to the small beach house. First I should explain the context that this house is in. I use the term "beach house" because the community where its located is at the beach, but few if any houses are truly on the beach. All houses are excluded from the dune zone and sit in a zone inland from the dunes. Some of the houses which are right against the dunes will be bigger, taller to attempt to look over the dunes for an ocean view, but most have no chance! Sounds bad but it preserves the fragile dune ecosystem and protects the houses from atlantic storms. So what you have on the inland side of the dunes are older communities with a network of streets which are pretty similar to other late 40s early 50s neighborhoods. Mostly a grid of narrow streets without sidewalks. These stretch to the other waterfront which is the bay side. I didn't explain that. Most beaches here are not on the mainland, but on large barrier islands that lie just off the mainland. So these beach communities lie on these narrow strips of sandy island with a bay on one side, and the ocean on the other. So our project lies one property away from the bay, and about 3 blocks from the ocean. In placing the new bedroom above the one story porch - essentially turning the roof deck into the master bedroom - we will be providing it with a great view of the bay. The owners also wished for a balcony on the second level, something I felt might be beyond the budget and omitted from the first scheme. The idea here was to incorporate the existing roof line into a new and more dynamic profile. By removing the rake overhang and bringing the existing roof into a more purely geometric form we could bring out a more modern quality. This strategy also preserved the existing roof framing, and minimized our intervention, to extend what we could do with the budget. We also proposed a new wrap around porch, a characteristic of some of the older beach homes that date back to the late 1800s, early 1900s. It is a great mediating space between the street and the house, and a "hedge" that could easily become a balcony in scheme 2!

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A small addition project

An addition to a small cottage in a seaside community I thought I would share this project through the blog. It is not a stock plan, nor a prefab, but a small addition for a client who has a modern sensibility and wishes to transform their existing house into a modern house. The existing house was a typical one story beach cottage, like many that were built on the NJ shore communities during the 1950s. Some time later it had an addition to create a second floor and a small side porch. There are 3 small bedrooms upstairs and one bathroom. The owners wish to add a new master bedroom and bath to the second floor, and "re-invent" the exterior to make the house feel modern. They collected a wonderful range of images which they presented to me in the form of a collage. This has been a consistent reference point for me as the project has progressed. Some of the images were from their travels, others clipped from Dwell. The first step in the design process after measuring the exiting conditions is to mockup the existing house in 3d to work with during design. The small roof deck over the porch has a great view of the bay, yet the owners rarely use it because of its location. Budget is always a concern on projects like this so the question was how to re-invent while keeping the work limited. Thats it for now.

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