About fifteen years ago my wife and I bought a circa 1790 farm house that had been added on to over the centuries. We restored portions of the house and renovated others. When our children outnumbered the available bedrooms, we decided to add on. Like many farm houses, ours was built close to the road on one side and next to a hill on the other. Of the two sides left, only one allowed us to add a bedroom without [...]
About half of the work in our office is new construction and half renovations and additions. When designing a home from scratch some of the most important elements to study(besides the clients wishes) are views, site features, sun and wind direction, and the approach to the site. The most important single element in an addition/renovation is the existing building. Sometimes the portion you save and restore is key to the rest of the project. Although it is almost impossible to [...]
There is no absolute prototype for a farmhouse, but most of us can recognize one when we see it. By definition the originals were located on farms and were integral to the life and work of those farm families who lived there. Depending on when and where those homes were built, they could be made of stone, brick, shingles or clapboard. Most farmhouses had porches since there was no air conditioning and many farm and family chores were undertaken there. [...]
When our third child was on the way, we decided to add a bedroom to our home. The room we were planning for our new born son was immediately claimed by his oldest sister. We realized that in fairness our first born deserved first choice of rooms, at that point we began to reevaluate the design of the new room. This was an epiphany since our mental image of the room changed immediately. In fact the babies room would soon [...]
