A family of four sharing one bathroom. Now a house that fits them.
A small kitchen, a crowded basement, and four bedrooms upstairs sharing a single full bath. They assumed an addition would have to match the existing house.
They asked how you open two floors of a house when the rear wall is structural, and how one continuous space can span an old house and a new addition. Both are routine work, done all the time.
The third assumption was that the addition had to look like the house. It did not, and the alternative was closer to how they actually live.
Two floors across the back. Downstairs the kitchen doubles. Upstairs the primary bath pushes out into the addition, and the old bathroom becomes closet, hallway and storage.
The front stays subdued and neighbourhood-appropriate. The back carries the personality, with only a glimpse of it from the side.
And a blank wall on the addition that maps the shadows of the trees through the day and becomes a projection screen at night.
They used to project onto a sheet hung on the detached garage. Now the building is the screen, and the same surface does something else entirely during the day, catching the moving shadows of the trees.
People say it reads as sculpture: the frame wrapping the corner, the overlapping panel edges, the board-formed concrete.
"Luis understood our budget constraints while supporting our vision for a cool modern addition for our 1930's home. He is highly knowledgeable on materials for the exterior of the house and provided us with multiple design options. Our biggest challenge was our contractors who were new to building modern structures, but Luis was a huge support in discussing construction and materials with the contractor and helped to solve many issues in a timely fashion."
Julia E. · Del Ray, Alexandria
Outgrown the house but not the neighbourhood?
Matching is one option. It is not the respectful one by default, and often not the one closest to how you live.
Read why it need not match →Rather talk it through? Start with one question.
"The front belongs to the street. The back belongs to them."Luis Boza · On when to match and when not to
