Craftsman Home Grows Up

Craftsman Home Grows Up.

With a growing family, my clients find themselves at the end of a dead-end road that backs up just shy of a school yard. Check the box for excellent privacy and safety. The lot, although raised above the street level, has a perfect rectangular and flat backyard that could most likely qualify as any United States Croquet Association sanctioned court. With a need for bedrooms and a play space, should we go up, out, or both with an addition design? With setbacks and a myriad of other zoning regulations in the mix, we decided to go up and then up again, to save the coveted outdoor space.

The existing home was a single floor ranch with just enough craftsman charm to cause worry about blowing it, but we were confident we could make something work functionally and stylistically. On a neighborhood walk my clients discovered their dream home design look just a few blocks away. It was a new, “tear down,” craftsman style home featuring a gambrel style roof. Disguising height is a feature that gambrel roofs (or Dutch colonial homes) do masterfully. With this model in mind, we went to work designing their “new” home.

With the new gambrel roof design, the second floor was an easy fit up for bedrooms including a true master suite, while the upper steeper pitched gambrel roof area allowed for a spacious playroom on a third floor. Dormers front and back brought in light and added enough headroom for real usable play space there. Two new sets of stairs would stack comfortably upon the existing stair to the basement. Although the ridgeline was much higher than the existing roof ridge, the soffits of the new home were just a bit higher than the existing keeping it from appearing out of scale. Several neighboring homes are also rendered in the Dutch colonial style helping our dream home fit right in. With generous windows on the rear facing wall, we see clearly out over our preserved flat green space, and from that opposing view we appreciate our new home and its authentic lines.