Poetic license: the resonant haiku of outbuildings

Residential Architect, April, 2004 by Meghan Drueding

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When Barbee, AIA, ran into a slight problem when designing a house for a family in Austin, Texas. Due to their irregularly shaped lot, his clients' program just wouldn't fit into a single building. Then they happened to mention that they owned the adjacent, wooded piece of land as well, and the wheels in Barbee's head started turning.

He hit upon the notion of building a guesthouse there, one that would double as a detached screened porch. A scribbled napkin sketch he showed his clients caught their imagination, and the rest of the project unfurled just as casually. For instance, the simplest way of dealing with drainage was to raise the building up on piers, and that's what Barbee did. A speculative conversation with the clients about rain harvesting turned serious, so he designed an inverted roof that collects rainwater and channels it to a cistern. "Then the scissors trusses we used on the exterior were so wonderful that they needed to be expressed on the interiors, too," says Barbee. "One thing led to another."

project: Pledger Guest Cabin, Austin, Texas

architect: Barbee Architects, Austin

general contractor: Woodsmith Builders, Austin

structural engineer: Jerry Garcia, Austin

project size: 1,000 square feet

site size: 3 acres

construction cost: $125 per square foot

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The guesthouse is so removed from the main house that the mere act of walking several hundred yards down to it feels like taking a short vacation. Though it's wired with Category-5 cabling for Internet access, it contains no TV or stereo. Its awning windows and corresponding external shutters operate on pulleys, and snap-down shades modeled on boat covers provide protection from sun and rain. Both systems require the user to interact with the house, a situation Barbee fully intended. "Part of opening up a vacation home anywhere is unlocking shutters and taking the covers off furniture," he says. "Bringing those associations to the cabin makes it something other than just a guesthouse."

board meetings

This Seattle windsurfer's shed started out as a simple container for surfboards, sails, kayaks, and other water-sports equipment. But during the design and building process it evolved into a more multipurpose project. "It became a place where the client could bring his kids down to be near the water," says architect Thomas Isarankura. "And a gathering place for cocktails. It became something beyond a storage building."

Much of the shed's appeal stems from its invitingly transparent structure. Its walls are cedar 2x2s spaced an inch and a half apart, just enough to let the boards' bright colors and rounded shapes show through. The shed's Lexan roof, UV-rated to prevent stored sails from fading, reaches out over an expansive ipe deck that wraps around the building. Both the ipe and the cedar can handle Seattle's rain and humidity, as can the copper plumbing pipes that form the railing around the deck.

Isarankura and his client chose a site right on the water, about 200 feet down a steep hill from the main house. He worked with the general contractor to figure out a system of relatively small building components that could be hand-carried down an existing stair. The shed is secured by metal pin-piles drilled into the sandy soil and connected at the base of the building to vertically cantilevered fir posts. From the water, though, it looks almost weightless, as if it might be caught up in a strong wind and blown away. Such was Isarankura's intent. "It's a beautiful site," he says. "We didn't want to just plop a box there."

project: Board Shed, Seattle

architect: Heliotrope Architects, Seattle

general contractor: An Urban Company, Seattle

project size: 750 square feet

site size: 0.5 acres

construction cost: $100 per square foot

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

perfect pitch

Like many a great painting, novel, or piece of music, this southern Connecticut violin studio came together a burst of inspiration. "The client and I sat down and designed it in about two hours," says Jim Childress, FAIA, of Centerbrook Architects in Centerbrook, Conn. The owner, a professional violinist, wanted to remodel her existing studio and improve its connection to the main house, which the firm had previously renovated.

Childress had designed music halls before and followed the same principles here, albeit on a smaller scale. "In a music hall, you want the sound to bounce off the walls so it fills the space," he says. "In a room this small, making that happen becomes a lot easier." He banished carpeting and most soft surfaces from the studio to let the client's music reverberate. Curved wood ceiling panels provide another bouncing point for sound, and their shapes, based on similar fabric panels in the main house's living room, evoke the smooth twists and turns of a violin. Since the studio faces the living room, Childress opened up that wall with sliding doors, enhancing the give-and-take between the two spaces.

He and project architect Stephen Holmes, AIA, refinished all the exterior walls with vertical cedar siding to match the main house and extended the eaves for the same reason. Even the studio's round window, with its stick detailing, resembles the owner's master bath window. "In this case the main house is small, and the outbuilding makes something grander out of it," Childress says. "So it made sense to have the studio be like the house." Such graceful touches as a fluted entrance canopy and an exterior wall's wooden arc detail strike just the right notes of exuberance in the serene composition.