Construction Shots - Little Gull

This sustainably designed house under construction has a timber frame roof in the great room and SIPs panels on the all of the roofs.  SIPs (structural insulated panels) are extremely air tight, well insulated and fabricated to precision off-site. The panels are made from rigid foam insulation sandwiched between strand board.  The ridge beam of this house is engineered lumber and the rafters, which are spaced 8 feet on center, are douglas fir.

This is the rear of the house, which faces south.  The overhang will shade the high summer sun from heating the great room, and will allow the low angled winter rays to penetrate the space.  The view out of the future expanse of sliding doors is of Little Gull in Greenport.

These temporary stairs follow the lines of the final design.  The stairs to the 4 bedrooms will partially open to the great room. They will be ulitmately screened with a wood slat wall that will give visual and spatial division between the public and private areas of the house.  

Teeny Tiny House Renovation

Thank you to my clients-turned-friends Jim Brodsky and Huck Hirsch for sending me this fun video of Jim installing a flush girder along with their contractor Adam West.  Obviously Jim is a really hands on kind of guy on the job site as well as the kitchen (see my previous blog post).  

Architectural Lesson of the Day: Flush girders are structural members that are recessed into the ceiling above to conceal or minimize their visibility at the ceiling line below.  Dropped girders are structural members that sit below the joist at the ceiling.

Smitten Kitchen

Smitten Kitchen is the name of one of my favorite food blogs.  Deb Perelman has a beautiful site with delicious, inspiring recipes and stories about her adventures in her tiny NYC galley kitchen.  I love to cook, and I love to read about food, and I especially love to eat.  I'm an architect, however, and you didn't come here to read about food!  Here's the point of this post:  

I went to a friend's birthday party last weekend and met someone who told me that they are renovating their kitchen.  They asked me about contractors I have worked with and spoke of their design ideas.  Then they asked if I had ever worked with Ikea kitchens.  (I have once).  I learned that Ikea has a kitchen event every three years or so.  They auction off the display kitchens including appliances, hardware, inserts, countertops, plumbing fixtures and lighting to the highest bidder.  Well...these folks bid $3200 for an entire kitchen more cabinets than they could ever fit in their kitchen and they won.  What a deal!  Most kitchens cost at least $20,000 with appliances and countertops.  

The above photo is a custom kitchen that I designed for a sweet little cottage in Sag Harbor.   The photo below are squash blossoms that we stuffed with ricotta cheese filling.  After the photo was taken, we dipped the blossoms in a light batter and fried them to crunchy perfection.  

It's Not the Size that Matters....

Ive been meeting with many potential clients these days.  Some of the projects are for new homes, some are for additions, some are for renovations.  Most are projects located on the water.  When I ask how they found me, people almost always say they found me through my website.  Most of the projects on my website are house renovations.  However, I enjoy working on smaller projects as well, such as sun room additions and kitchen renovations.  

What matters to me is that my clients share my design philosophy: Clarity.  My primary goal in design is to derive uncomplicated solutions that solve spatial organization problems, both from usability and visual standpoints.  

I use honest, sustainable materials whenever possible to achieve the highest energy efficiency. By investing wisely in materials and equipment we can increase the intrinsic value of a property.  Most people can "feel" that a house is designed well without being able to tell you why.  

Top 10 Things You’ll Never Hear Me Say

1.    You have way too much money budgeted for this project

2.    You should listen to the contractor instead– he has fantastic design ideas

3.    Designing that project was so easy…it took almost no time at all

4.    I am going to reduce my fee since this project is so straight forward

5.    Your house is under budget and ahead of schedule

6.    I think I’ll take the weekend off

7.    No one else besides me will notice it…leave it like that

8.    I like vinyl siding

9.    Architecture school was a breeze

10.  I’m planning my European Summer vacation

Uplifting News

Most people have never seen a house lifted before.  I had never heard of the process until I moved to the East End of Long Island 20 years ago.  The house renovation and addition that just commenced last week began this way.  The general contractors, Seifert Construction hired Dawn House & Building Movers to do the job.

There were 15 hydraulic lifts, supporting 6 temporary steel beams synchronized by controllers located on two separate trucks that raised the house incrementally.  This house will be raised four feet to allow the masons to add to the existing foundation.  It will then be lowered back down 2 feet to its final resting height. 

The owners wanted to raise the house higher than the code requires to minimze the risk of another storm event like Sandy.  According to FEMA regulations, this house will not have any mechanical equipment in the crawl space.  In case of flood, the smart vents that I specified for the foundation wall will allow the water to flow through the crawl space rather than damage the wall and undermine the stability of the house.  

Incredible view of Peconic Bay from the back of the house

Diversion

Right now I’m designing a house renovation and addition.  Actually, I’m NOT designing because I’ve hit a roadblock.  I’ve “designed myself into a corner,” as my college professors used to say, and I’m not sure how to get out at the moment.    I thought I’d be productive in a different way and write about it for a little while.  Sometimes when I take a break, my subconscious continues to problem solve.  When I return to the drawing board, the answers are more easily accessible.  I’m hoping that will happen this time.

Lately I’ve been thinking about an interview with Pharrell Williams I heard on NPR last New Year’s Eve. He speaks about the creative process.  It resonated with me:

And it would have never happened if the studio wouldn't have kept telling me, "No, it's not good enough. No, it's not good enough."

So all the no's actually brought about a product that you're really proud of.

Brought me to a place of zero, and that nirvana, that place of that stillness of nothing is when you can ask yourself a clear question and get a clear answer back. I just wanted to give that to all the listeners, because that in itself, man, when you feel like you don't have anymore answers, I want you to know that you're the closest to the best thing you'll ever do in your life. There's no ego in it, and you're just asking a clear question. You don't know where the answer's gonna come from, and that's when the answer comes. I just wanted to share that.

Because honestly that song called "Happy" and every lyric came out of that place. I'm just so thankful that all the factors and all the circumstances pushed me in that direction, because I would have never written that song on my own.

It’s intriguing to me that the creative process, no matter the medium, has common threads.