Surprise! This PREFAB HOME is Now Available on the West Coast!!

The designer’s task was to build a modern, budget-minded home that was livable and respected its rural environment. The Yelm residence is a contemporary take on a country home: using a combination of simple, cost-effective methods to create a warm, comfortable space through clean lines and precise design. A minimal exterior material palette of wood and stucco siding with metal panel accents helps to highlight the beauty of the 10 acres of land on which the house rests. Concrete masonry unit (CMU) walls frame the entry and a flat roof plane hovers overhead to ground the project into the prairie style landscape. The home reflects the clients’ informal lifestyle and relationship to the environment. He is a graphic designer who works from home; her hobbies include sewing, craft projects, and gardening.
The home is 2,200 square feet and L-shaped in plan, which allows for the master suite and office to be separated from the guest rooms, craft room and garage. Centrally placed are the open plan living room, kitchen, and dining room. These rooms create a core space with expansive glass walls that connect the owners visually and physically to the landscape. Private views of foothills and tree-covered wetlands are offered through the transparent core, along with sightings of deer and elk near the back patio. Designed with radiant floor heating, heat-recovery technology, and natural ventilation, the simplicity of the floor plan’s organization creates an intimate and warm interior environment. A concrete masonry fireplace paired with the copper-toned, stained birch ceiling also adds material warmth. Circulation through the space is enlivened by built-in storage benches, acting as visual breaks and adding pops of color. Efficient planning and the repetition of elements throughout the house helped to keep costs down, resulting in an economically priced, modern home that compliments its natural environment.

Sited gently on the lower slope of a dramatic sixty foot high coastal bank and surrounded by miles of undeveloped Cape Cod National Seashore beaches and scrub pines is a warm, modern beach house that is more than just a place to enjoy uninterrupted ocean views and sea breezes. Our clients dreamed of a house that would work equally well as both a year-round family “camp” and also as a “thinking retreat” for collaborating with their colleagues. From the beginning of design it was critically important to us and to our clients – as well as the Town Conservation Commission and National Seashore representatives – that the house fit into its fragile site seamlessly. Our team responded with great care by designing the house to curve and shift softly with the natural topography and also by envisioning the new native and drought resistant landscaping growing back tight to the house as if both had always been there together. The main house is conceived of as a collage of overlapping, cantilevered planes and volumes that culminate in a large living / dining space defined by an asymmetrically arcing copper roof plane. Entry to the house is by way of a long ramp through what will in a few years be a thicket of native pines and bushes, then through curving cedar shingled planes. The inland side of the house is tucked into its shifting, sandy landscape and is comprised of cedar shingled planes that float above the ground and contain bedrooms, bathrooms, and the kitchen, and lower volumes of horizontal tongue and groove cedar boards that enclose bedrooms and a gathering space for teenage sons. On the Cape Cod Bay side, the house opens up through walls of glass to endless water views and heavenly sea breezes. In the middle of the house, just inside the front door, is an architectural “hole” that allows the house to breathe and cool itself naturally most of the year through its floor to ceiling awning windows, and which also provides views of the sky from a shady breezeway on the lower level. Along one wall of the hole is a trellis planted with evergreen and seasonally aromatic flowering vines. On the Cape Cod Bay side, the house opens up through walls of glass to endless water views and heavenly sea breezes. In the middle of the house, just inside the front door, is an architectural “hole” that allows the house to breathe and cool itself naturally most of the year through its floor to ceiling awning windows, and which also provides views of the sky from a shady breezeway on the lower level. Along one wall of the hole is a trellis planted with evergreen and seasonally aromatic flowering vines. Separated from the main house by a screen porch and contiguous deck, is a separate art / yoga / thinking studio that seemingly floats fourteen feet above the ground. Inside is a single large loft space as well as a full bath, and below is an open-air summer art studio and boat / beach toy storage, behind walls of wood slats and matching barn doors.

When it comes to modern homes, color is bit of a rarity in the past few decades. First it was cream, beige and white that dominated the 90’s and early 2000’s. Soon it was turn of gray to take over the mantle as the hottest neutral in town that does it all. Even when you […]

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