Custom Residential
Details of an Architect’s Own Remodel
Final project photography of the Seattle Box Remodel will be coming up in a few months. But, in the meantime, Jeff presents some detail-specific shots of the house, along with some of the cool stories that go with them.
January 23, 2013
The devil is in the details.
If there's one thing that I spend more time worrying and obsessing over than anything else, it's the little details that make a project special. The execution of details is easily the biggest thing that separates a space designed by an architect from one built with waved hands and a speedy contractor. Both will keep you warm, dry, and give you square footage, but that the extra effort spent really personalizing the space with site-specific details is what makes the work we do so great.
I’ve written before about how details that aren’t beautifully executed can be so distracting to me. Not only are they lost opportunities, but also they are just sloppy work. So, imagine when an architect gets to design his own remodel. For everyone else, it looks cool, but I can tell you that I sweated the details and probably made my contractor mildly insane. I say, that with Board & Vellum, we are your advocate for great architecture. That’s truly how I feel, as I think it is my duty to go to bat for you. Now, when it is my own house, I’m probably just an advocate for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Eh, same results perhaps?
Final project photography will be coming up in a few months. (First I need to settle back into a normal work pattern, now that I’m getting used to parenting a newborn and balancing our load of projects here at Board & Vellum.) But, I wanted to present some detail-specific shots of my house, as I think there are some cool stories to tell.
Floating Shelves
These shelves provide a great spot for dishes used on a daily basis.
Kitchens are where we spend the majority of our time and do the majority of our “moving things around.” Consequently, I wanted to have some open shelves where I could place the dishes that we use on a regular basis. Too many of these, and the dishes would sit and get dusty. So, I settled on just two of them. This whole elevation was carefully designed to be symmetrical, so these shelves helped anchor the central “light and airy” portion of the kitchen. The brackets are steel rods anchored into the shelf and the wall with plenty of epoxy. Not an easy thing to build, but they look great (and have integral light in them with hidden wires).
Dog Crate
The other side of the dog crate sits below a built in pantry.
Viewed from the kitchen side, Helo sits in his favorite spot with Athena observing the photographer.
I’ve written about this one before, but it really came out great. One side of the crate is a big door that sits at a stair landing with a view towards the entry, so the dogs can get plenty of air and a vantage point of who is doing what. On the other side, a door slides down into place at night to seal them off, while still allowing them a view. The slide down crate will eventually have a handle on top that will allow it to rest on a hook on the wall. The sides of the vertical casing help act as guides (along with some embedded metal rails) for the slide down door.
LEGO Shelves
LEGO sits in IKEA bins that slide into cut grooves in the shelving system (bins removed for clarity).
One of the first things I wrote about on this blog was my “mild” LEGO obsession. Part of the goal of the remodel was to create a LEGO room that had a better connection to the rest of the house. I designed custom shelves that take an off-the-shelf product (in this case, IKEA bins meant for toys), and allow for a flexible shelving and storage system. The stored LEGO acts as a backdrop for the room, and is far more interesting than wallpaper.
Walnut Vanities
The bathrooms have walnut vanities, which are a nod to some of my contemporary design aesthetics. The rest of the house has more built-in, transitional cabinet details, but I believe that bathrooms have the freedom to escape further from the year the house was built. These vanities are built to look like free-standing furniture (the open space under the cabinet really helps the room feel bigger). And, careful attention was given to make sure that the cabinet fronts were one piece of wood. You can see how the grain carries straight across the gap (and kudos to the cabinet maker who actually cut out the 1/8” gap from the wood to account for the actual gap between the drawers).
Laundry Room
Simple white finishes help present a clean and tidy room.
A laundry room isn’t the most glamorous room in the house, but it does need to function. I kept mine bright and functional, with some inexpensive design solutions to give it some extra usability. The IKEA cabinets have a high-gloss finish, the subway tile is basic, and the counter is a straight-forward, lower-cost quartz. The sink is as big as possible (and from Home Depot), the faucet is an industrial looking pull-out spray for washing the dogs (and now the baby apparently), and the shelves are inexpensive IKEA shelves mainly meant for pot racks. We use them here to drip dry towels and whatnot.
Step to Bar
The stair tread beyond slides directly into the bar top creating one clean surface.
This photo shows two things. On one hand, I had to size the depth of this counter carefully, as we didn’t have much room, and I wanted as much floor space as possible. On the other, I needed a faucet at the bar sink. This is a case of making sure that the extra inches were used where they were most needed (the floor space), rather than behind the faucet. The handle for the faucet is off to the side, so there wouldn’t be a conflict between your hand and the bar while operating the faucet.
Secondly, I went to great lengths to make sure that the bar top lined up with the stair treads. Knowing that the stairs were going to be stained cherry (the existing floors in the house were cherry which we stained a medium brown), I didn’t want to introduce a new wood so close to the stairs. After detailing where the stairs would actually land, it became apparent that I could line up the bar top with the stairs and create this smooth detail. Now my dogs have a great runway to walk on as they come down the stairs. More importantly, some awkward transitions were avoided, and the whole thing looks clean and purposeful.
Retaining Existing Details
The column on the left is original. The cabinet on the right is new, but ties seamlessly into the old.
Media equipment is kept in the cabinets at the base of this largely open shelving. A library ladder slides by.
The house had two existing columns between the living and dining rooms. At the base, was a built-in detail that looks exactly like the bottom of this photo. I wanted built-in shelves in the living room to give a formerly cold room some “coziness factor.” To tie it all into the original details of the house, a custom knife was made to copy the existing trim, and I carried that around to a cabinet at the base of the shelves. The steel ladder by the guys at the Boiler Room gave the wall a bit of an extra modern edge.
Lighting
Go for fun when picking your lights.
This is less of an architectural detail, and more of an interior design detail, but great care was taken to make sure the lights we chose reflected our tastes, while also highlighting the space. We chose this great light fixture for the dining room because we got a great deal on it, and I thought it helped add a bit of fun to a rather austere space. The crisp white trim and dark gray walls help give the space a formal edge conducive to dining, but the bright and whimsical light helps lighten the mood. It's serious and fun all at once, just like the people who live there.
Closets
Built-in closets are made nice enough to be put front and center in a tight room.
We didn’t have room for a traditional walk-in-closet, so I took a whole wall of our master bedroom and created built-in cabinet doors that were jumbo-sized and concealed a traditional closet system. The middle bank of cabinets conceals two hampers, a sock drawer, and a big cabinet for hats and random things. The whole wall of bright cabinets helps tie the room into the age of the house, while also contrasting with the dark, navy blue walls.
Built-In Dresser
This shallow space (11 1/2") still allowed for a great built-in that brings architectural interest to this otherwise plain bedroom.
In laying out the floor plan, I opted to keep the master shower to 6’ long, and use another 12” to create a built-in dresser in the baby’s room. Super shallow drawers with a shelf on top help make the whole space look purposeful, and give a rather boring bedroom something interesting to anchor it. Adjustable mini-shelves at either side of a framed mirror provide some fun storage options.
Truly Frameless Shower Glass
Here, the tile pattern goes straight through the concealed channel that holds the glass into place, and purposely avoids drawing any attention to it.
No installer likes doing truly frameless shower glass. They’d love to just throw some clips on the glass and screw it into the wall. After some back and forth, I was able to convince them to conceal a metal U-channel in the depth of the tile and let the glass truly be frameless. I’d rather you look at the vanity and tile than a big metal clip.
Tile Patterns
Carefully lining up the tile to meet the plumbing connection to the wall was tricky, but worth it.
Laying out the tile pattern is always a challenge, as it takes a lot of effort to make it look so painless. Not only did I have to align the top of the vanity with a tile course (see the above photo), but I also wanted this rain shower head by Cifial to come out at exactly the intersection of three tiles. It was a royal pain in the butt to do this, I’m sure, but now you don’t even notice it, and that’s the goal.
Dog Food Tilt-Out Bin
Dog food no longer has to sit in a big jar on the counter!
In creating the jig-saw of my island, I wanted a tilt-out bin for dog food. A custom metal cap for this is coming to help keep the food fresh.
Trim Details
This trim also carries around the room to become the top of a wainscot panel.
A simple white glass mosaic tile was chosen to surround the gas fireplace. It provides a bit of detail, but doesn't overwhelm the clean lines of the trim.
Older homes are MADE by the attention to detail in trimwork. This relatively “cleaned up” wainscot / mantel / shelf detail was inspired by the same detail at the base of our columns. The original trim was copied and used as a horizontal line all around a rather awkwardly-sized family room. The otherwise tall room was visually lowered and it allows you to sit on a couch next to the fire without sitting at the bottom of a chasm.
There are a million other little pictures I could share, but I wanted to give you a bit of insight into the thought that goes into what I do. I don’t always get the freedom to share the story of each detail in all of the homes I’ve designed, so having these photos of my own house are a great tool. And, the next time you look at your house, think about the time and effort that every little piece of your home took to put together. And if you are left underwhelmed, well, I know an architect you can call.
