Floating Cube with Concrete Feature Wall

This house is on a very narrow lot and was designed with an attached garage at the front that all but obscured a front door that was deeply recessed beside the garage, preventing any light from reaching the front of the ground floor. It looked like a garage with a house behind it and had no street presence.

The client needed to add space, but a rear addition wasn’t possible due to site constraints. The garage didn’t need to be wide enough to accommodate a car. It was decided that we would narrow the garage so that it was still great for bikes and create a modest front addition that would reclaim some of the garage area as indoor living space, now with a wider front elevation facing to the street. We would also create a much larger addition at the 2nd floor that would act as a roof for the new front porch, and cantilever over the driveway to give sufficient interior space for 2 new kids’ bedrooms. The addition would be full width at the front, but narrow at the connection to the original, allowing for existing windows to continue to serve bedrooms in these locations.

Since it is pulled forward from the main house and set apart visually via cantilevers to the north and east, this volume presents itself as a floating cube. We used a white stucco to articulate just the “cube” and a grey stucco elsewhere to support the architectural idea. The “cube” receives support at the south-east corner via a concrete feature wall.  There is a reveal at the connection between the wall and the cube to further the notion that the cube is floating.  The wall serves as an interesting sculptural element and a welcome to the house while offering a bit of privacy for the new front porch.

The narrow windows are sized and positioned to allow a single bed to be placed in the room. This limited their size and forced their placement, so we used a change in cladding to connect and extend the windows as a single idea: a cube with a notch taken out.

The house now accommodates the entire family, and presents a unique and inviting face to the street, while bringing in much needed light to the ground floor.