When this home was built in 1979 in the Wonderland Hills neighborhood it was coined the ‘House of the Future’. Indeed it had a handful of major cutting edge construction details. For instance, the home was built on an ‘ICF’ foundation. This is an energy efficient type of concrete foundation utilizing ‘insulated concrete forms’. The home also had a groovy 4-season hot tub room with large south facing full height windows for passive solar heat gain. Despite some of the innovation, it was grossly outdated for what people want in a home today.
For instance, the kitchen was tiny and pinched off from the rest of the house. The home is nestled right up against the mountains yet had no views of the mountains. The primary suite was in the basement. In fact, there was no bedroom above ground at all in the home. There was an upper level loft type office space, but it got so stiflingly hot that it was uninhabitable for a good portion every year. The only way to access the secluded small backyard area was through a very slender sliding door. Lastly, the groovy hot tub was broken and the south facing passive solar glass was fogged out and inefficient.
Our solutions to these problems mainly fit into 2 main categories:
While the existing home did have a 2-tier loft space, there were several things limiting the usage of this area. First off there wasn’t enough space for a bedroom, a primary bathroom and closet. We solved this by expanding out over the existing garage below. We also expanded the uppermost level to accommodate the new primary closet and bathroom:
The new bedroom has a large double patio door that sports incredible views of the foothills. We also built a balcony with an opaque railing to provide privacy from the street but allow the homeowners to enjoy the views:
To solve the hot stale air in the space, we installed an entirely new ducted minisplit system solely to heat and cool the primary suite. The existing home’s forced air furnace remained to service the rest of the house, and we capped off any return/supply air from this existing furnace into the loft space. This system’s thermostat lives in the primary bedroom and gives the homeowners complete control of this area of the house.
One floorplan element of the existing home that really limited possibilities was the large hot tub area. This hot tub lived in the basement but was connected to the house via a fully vaulted greenhouse type space that extended up to the main level. We saw massive potential in the volume of this space. Our idea was to completely nuke the hot tub and convert this into a lower level rec room and a larger main level living/dining/kitchen area. We accomplished this by extending the main level floor framing over the hot tub area, and building a spiral staircase that connected the new lower level rec room to the expanded main level.
One happy result of this surgery is that it allowed us to provide large folding doors to the backyard (in lieu of the pinched sliding door).
For the kitchen, we knocked down 2 interior walls to connect the kitchen with the living room and dining room. These walls were loadbearing so we installed steel beams and a post to support the existing house above. We elected to make these structural elements an architectural feature.
One of our mantras when designing major home renovations is to accentuate the positive, and minimize the negative elements of the property. This house is unique for a number of reasons. It felt very chopped up due to it having 6 different levels (sub-basement below the garage, basement, entry/garage level, main level, upper level (above garage), and loft area a ½ flight above the upper level (above the kitchen). There’s no getting around using stairs when living in this home. But our project created a much more cohesive home with brighter and lighter spaces that work together. The ‘house of the future’ now finally works as a house for today.
