Modern Double Cantilever

The journey up to a house, and through the spaces inside, can be seen as a journey from the public to the private.  The most public is the walk up to the house from the street, gradually becoming less and less so as one approaches the front door, enters the house, makes their way through the public spaces like the living and dining rooms, and finally proceeds to sleeping areas.  (An ensuite water-closet is possibly the most private space in a house.)  In a multi-storey house, the spaces will likely be organized with the public spaces on the ground floor and the private spaces on the second.  By their very nature, private spaces need more walls, hallways, and doors, so they generally require more area than the corresponding public spaces.  The need to create more space on the second floor relative to the ground floor, as it is often the case, drove us to use a double cantilever at the rear.

The massing of a cantilevered space, especially when done in two directions, demands a change in material to support the architectural idea.  Here, the second floor is rendered as a white cube, cantilevering over a ground floor with contrasting wood siding.  To accentuate the cube and give it a sense of floating, we’ve used plenty of glass at the ground floor, including a corner window.

The entire house was reconfigured, so even though the front elevation remained the front of the house, the window openings needed to be completely reconfigured in order to work on the interior of the new rooms they serve.  Large picture windows paired with a narrow awning window that alternates sides as the observer looks up and down the elevation are used, with the basement benefiting from a large window well.  A modern canopy is sized to rationalize the composition that necessitated a smaller high window over the bathtub in the family bath above.

The interior has a clean modern feel that is also warm.  The stair guard becomes a floor to ceiling slat wall that allows light penetration and serves as a sculptural focal point at the midpoint of the plan.

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