New hall has a studious side

Sunset, Oct, 1988

The slender room added to the side of this two-story house serves as both office and hall. Part of an L-shaped addition that wraps around a corner of the house, the 6foot-wide hall moves traffic around kitchen and into a new family room.

Designed and built by architect Rann Haight of Clarksburg, California, the hall runs 21 feet along the old outside wall. On its new inside face, it opens to the remodeled kitchen. But the studious side is along tbe exterior.

Haight ran an oak-topped desk the length of the hall. It has room for four separate work stations: two places where his young daughters can do homework, space for a home office, and a counter area for small crafts projects.

Above the desk, a handsome hardwood bookcase literally hangs from the ceiling. Haight designed it to be adjustable and as lightweight as possible.

The vertical members, built like little ladders, have rungs made of 1/4-inch dowel that span parallel 2-by-2s spaced 7 5/8 inches apart. Each 1-by-8 horizontal shelf has a 1-by-2 glued and screwed (on edge) onto its underside to stiffen it. The 1 -by-2 stops short of the 1-by-8's ends so the shelf can rest on the dowel rungs. To keep the shelves from slipping off the rungs, Haight plugged a short dowel under each end of each board.

The shed-roofed hall rises to a secondstory master bath and closet area. Haight positioned several openings high in the ball's interior wall to improve air circulation to the upper floor. The openings also function as interior clerestories to let light from skylights in the hall reach these upper-level rooms.