October 2011
BuilderNews Magazine
Feature: Project Profile

 

A Texas Whole House Remodel

Keeping In-line With the Joneses

 

The Rosedale neighborhood of Austin, Texas, just north of the city’s downtown, is a quiet, residential neighborhood of winding, tree-lined streets and modest, single-family houses. Most of the homes in Rosedale were built in the 1930s and 40s and much of this original housing remains. Low-slung, single-story cottages and ranch homes sit on large, oversized lots that often top a quarter acre or more. Broad, manicured lawns, side yards and hedgerows separate one house from the next. It is the type of neighborhood where young couples move to start a family and where older folks have remained long after their children have grown. It is also the type of neighborhood, especially in Austin, that has recently attracted considerable attention.

To the city of Austin, Rosedale and neighborhoods like it are an important part of the city’s history, demarcating its progression from a small, southwestern capital into one of the most vibrant and acclaimed cities in the country. Rosedale, once having defined the outer limits of Austin, is now part Central Austin—a collection of some 40-plus neighborhoods that make up the city center. And the city, itself, is booming. Forbes rated Austin the “Best City for Jobs in 2011,” and over the past decade the population has jumped by nearly 40 percent. But, as often happens, with such a sudden and rapid rate of expansion there also comes problems, and Austin has seen its share.

Mark Lind is a Senior Project Designer with CG&S Design-Build, an Austin-based firm that recently completed the whole-house remodel of a typical, single-story Rosedale cottage. It was a squat, nondescript house, longer than it was wide, dark grey with a faded brown asphalt roof and a tiny one-car garage tacked onto the end. Two bedrooms and one bath sat on 1,100 square feet, the interior chopped up into your standard, mid-century dining room, living room and kitchen. The owners, a young professional couple, collect mid-century modern furniture and they wanted the remodel to fit that style. Lind was thrilled. “The original house wasn’t very distinct,” he says. “It was sort of like a cabin, and quite often remodeling clients want the addition to look like the original house. So it was quite refreshing to have people say, ‘No, we want to completely change the appearance.’”

CG&S first met with the clients in the fall of 2008, and Lind says that straight away things went well. A  CG&S crew visited the site, took measurements and Lind drew up some preliminary designs — just to get the ideas rolling. When, at their first official meeting and before Lind shared his ideas, the clients conveyed more of what they were looking for, Lind knew he had hit the mark. “It was as if they had already seen the drawings,” Lind says — that’s how close he’d come. Unfortunately for Lind, CG&S and the clients that was where the ease of the project ended and the worst of their troubles began.

CG&S named the project the Silver Agave house, for the three-foot, spiked desert plant that stands at the end of the drive. The Shoal Creek, a tributary of the nearby Colorado River, runs through the center of Rosedale and skirts the far back corner of the roughly 9,000-sqaure-foot lot. This, unfortunately, put the Agave house in the Shoal Creek floodplain, which attracted the attention of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA, since 1968, provides low-cost, federal flood insurance for houses in high-risk areas. The insurance is cheap, cheaper than it would be otherwise, but as a consequence, FEMA also gets a say in what can and can’t be built. The FEMA approval alone took six months, set strict restrictions and vastly hindered the design. “Basically, [FEMA] told us: ‘Limit yourself to the existing footprint, you can’t spread out,’” Lind says, “and so we changed from pushing out to deciding we had to go up.”

But to go up, as Lind notes, would present its own list of challenges and concerns, the most important of which involved the existing Rosedale residents. Rosedale, like most of Central Austin, has recently attracted a new, younger buyer, looking for homes close to the city center. As a result, the neighborhood is being redeveloped, and in several instances this has led to some of the smaller, historic homes being torn down and replaced with much larger, two and three-story homes often out of character with the existing neighborhood. Many of the residents objected, and the city reacted. In 2006, the Austin City Council passed the “Residential Design and Compatibility Standards,” dubbed the McMansion ordinance for its far–reaching and contentious efforts to limit the size and shape of homes built in Central Austin. The list of McMansion limitations is numerous and includes, among others, a restriction on the home’s floor space to no more that 40 percent of the lot size and frontline setbacks based entirely on the average setback of the surrounding homes.

While Lind’s design of the Silver Agave fit well within the McMansion parameters, not even coming close to such expansive dimensions, Lind says that nonetheless the ordinance has had a major impact on his work as a designer.“You have to put this into the context of this really rancorous debate over what is or is not a McMansion,” he explains. “What no one wants now is to be accused of building a McMansion.”

The owners wanted to reinvent the house, to add more space, and the budget allowed for a near doubling of the existing home. The challenge for Lind, however, was to do all this, on the existing footprint, while creating a look that remained “compatible” with the surrounding single-story houses.

The first to go was the garage. Originally a one-car garage built on a shoddy concrete slab, Lind transformed this into a two-story addition and nearly 500-sqaure-feet of added living space. Immediately, Lind saw the impact this could have on the home’s appearance and sought to reduce it. ”I didn’t want to have a tower sticking onto the front of this one-story cottage,” Lind explains. The first floor siding is cement stucco, intended to give weight and presence at the end of the driveway. Above that, a slender bank of horizontal windows rims the entire structure, dividing the lower and upper floors. Vertical, fiber-cement siding with cedar battens on the second floor help further this division. The near-flat roof, no attic and broad overhangs then cap the tower, stopping the eye and condensing the visual height of the structure. The continuation of the standing-seam roof down one side of “the tower” further draws the eye downward, as would the flow of water over a waterfall.

Lind then continued this diminishing approach to the design for the second-floor addition on the main house. A master bedroom and bath attaches to the second floor loft and stairwell that, along with a first floor dining area, replaced the old garage. The result is an 800-sqaure-foot master suite that includes a utility room and second-floor living area. Again working to reduce the home’s visual impact, Lind slid the addition to the rear the house and recreated the original low-pitched roof at the front. The attic was once more eliminated and the second floor ceiling follows the pitch of the roof — from 8’ 6” at the peak to 7’ 6” at the outside wall. Another long row of windows faces the street. “The second floor does not have any wall at all, just a bank of windows,” Lind explains, “so that the apparent massing of the house still reads like a one-story house.”

The ground floor of the main house was left much like it was. The same roof line. The same front windows. And the recently installed Ipe (a Brazilian wood) covered porch and banister were left intact. “You don’t put Ipe up and paint it,” Lind explains. “It’s just too expensive.”

Inside the house, the interior is a stripped-down, box-like design that coordinates with the home’s exterior. The existing bedrooms were repainted and the ground-floor bath updated with new fixtures and a low-cost ceramic tile. The main living area was then opened up to include the added dining area, the sparse, open staircase and a compact horseshoe kitchen that faces the living room. The inclusion of the beefy, custom-built shelving above the kitchen counter accentuates the mid-century modern motif and melds well with the owners’ tastes in furniture.

At a finished 2,100 square feet, it is fair to say that the Silver Agave house achieved most, if not all, of what Lind, the clients, FEMA and the Rosedale community had hope it would. It is new. Modern. Different. And yet, in the vernacular of the existing neighborhood, it fits and fits well, ready to blend into the historic fabric of Rosedale, rather than standout as an obvious (and oversized) addendum to it.

July 2011
BuilderNews Magazine
Feature: Project Profile

 

Sustainable in the Desert

Howling Winds, Scorching Sun? No Problem

 

Every new construction project starts with a few parameters: site constraints, budget, or a client’s special wishes. This project had a list.

The challenge: Design and build a low-cost, sustainable home in the Mojave Desert, where the sun beats down 350 days a year, the wind blows like a sandblaster, and the summer heat can top a blistering 115 degrees.

The solution: ISO shipping containers.

The project began in early 2009, when the client, Lion’s Gate movie executive Tim Palen, contacted architect Walter Scott Perry, founding principal of ecotechdesign in Los Angeles, CA. “The client wanted to build something in a remote location, for very little money, and in a short period of time,” Perry recalls of their initial meetings. Perry has worked with sustainable design and architecture since the 1970s and often takes a “kit-of-parts” approach to his designs, freely mixing conventional and innovative materials. “Shipping containers,” he says, “just seemed like the most cost effective and expedient way to do it.”

To arrive at this conclusion, Perry first worked through each of the project’s three major constraints: budget, time and the environment. The building site, a two-and-half-acre lot, sits on a small bluff outside Joshua Tree, CA, overlooking the low mesquite and chaparral brush lands of the Mojave high desert. It is hot and dry and difficult to access, making it a tough place to deliver materials and an even rougher place to work. This led Perry to first consider a standard prefabricated home, something often used in the region, which would go up quick and require the least amount of on-site labor. The only catch was the price. The client set a budget of $250,000, and as Perry notes, a high-quality prefab in southern California can run $250 to $350 a square foot. Not much home for the money, unless the price could be reduced. Perry’s initial estimate for the purchase, fabrication, and install of shipping containers was $100 a square foot.

The Mojave high-desert environment further lent itself to Perry’s shipping container design when he considered the long-term impacts the desert would have on the home. Shipping containers — manufactured, most recently, from core 10 steel and sealed with a two-part, marine-grade primer — are one of the most indestructible structures on the planet. The corrosive, salt-laden wind and persistent sun of the open ocean, for all its water, is remarkably similar to conditions in the desert. As Perry says, “If you framed this thing out of wood, the sun would just eat (it) up.” The obvious solution was steel, and shipping containers fit that bill.

Working then off the modern, industrial look of the shipping containers, Perry was able to move onto other elements of the design. One in particular is the client’s photo studio. “The owner wanted a box,” Perry recalls, a large, light-controlled box to be used for photo shoots. All factors considered, Perry was drawn to a Butler, pre-engineered steel building, with industrial ribbed metal siding. The building, a standard commercial unit, melded well with the aesthetics of the shipping containers, while also conforming to the project’s three major constraints. It was low-cost, durable, and could be assembled in a matter of days.

Another key element in the home’s design is the custom-built, sunshade, which forms the roof and southern façade of living area. Shade in the desert is a vital commodity, and Perry designed that commodity into the home. Between the living area to the west and the studio to the east, Perry left open a 400-square-foot “desert room,” with lush greenery and a paving stone and pebbled floor. The sunshade, constructed of repurposed industrial struts and perforated aluminum panels, forms the southern wall and roof of the desert room and extends out to shade the house. An eight inch gap separates the sunshade from the building’s exterior and, all told, reduces the home’s solar exposure by 50%. As an afterthought to the design, Perry might incorporate different panel opacities to achieve varying levels of shading. “On the roof, for example,” he says, “you might have 80% shading, (while) on the walls you’d have 50%, because you want to see through the walls.”

The builder on the project, Eric Engheben, owner of 44 West Construction in Topanga, CA, first met with the client at an LA home show, where 44 West had a renovated shipping container on display. 44 West began working with containers in 2006 and had since completed four shipping container projects, along with its high-end custom homes. The Tim Palen Studio at Shadow Mountain would be the company’s fifth and largest container project to date. “We like the opportunity to work with something different.” Engheben says. “It is more of a challenge.”

44 West works out of a 12,000-square-foot facility in Gardenia, CA, where it fabricates the containers into various modular units, fully finished and ready to install. To Perry, this was part of the appeal. “We do everything,” Engheben says. “The containers are laid out in the yard, and we do the cutting, the framing, plumbing, electric — everything. We then package them up, protect the windows, take out the sliding doors, and head-on down the road. All that is left to do is to secure the units to each other and to the foundation and tie the mechanicals together.”

Construction on the project began in early 2010, with 44 West purchasing six containers from the docks of Long Beach for $2,600 each, which it then fabricated into different units: three for the ground floor living space, two for the second floor bedroom and bath, and the last as a storage unit off the studio. The exteriors were then painted with a standard, low VOC exterior paint, white to reflect the sun, and custom Milgard windows were installed. To finish the interiors, 44 West uses steel studs encased in a three-part insulation system that creates a R26 wall, with two thermal barriers separating the interior from exterior wall. A layer of spray foam is affixed to the outside wall; the cavities are filled with Wool batts; and foam board sheathes the studs. Plywood is then installed and skim-coated for appearance. Plywood, Engheben explains, travels better than sheetrock.

Wanting to keep as much as possible of the container visible, Perry and the client chose to leave exposed the container’s original plywood floors, sanding and sealing the plywood with water-based polyurethane. Mahogany plywood, matching the container floors, was then used on the home’s circular staircase. The ceilings of the units were also left exposed and insulated from above with R40, slanted foam boards, Densdeck roof boards, a cool-roof TPO membrane, and, over the living quarters, the perforated sun shade.

To Engheben, delivery and setup of the containers was the most dramatic and satisfying part of the project, when in a matter of hours the building site was transformed from an open site of concrete stem walls and piers into a nearly fully finished home. “A lot of people who have come to watch the process say, ‘I could never have imagined that what you were building in that facility would end up like this,’” Engheben says. “When you build a two story home in a facility and everything is on one floor, the containers are four feet apart, and when you walk between them it gives you a cavernous feeling, confined. When these are put together and it opens up the space, people are amazed.”

In less than a year from the start of construction, the Tim Palen Studio at Shadow Mountain, a 2,300-square-foot, one bedroom, one and a half bath home, including a 1000-square-foot photography studio, was constructed for the finished price of $150 a square foot, nearly half the cost of a comparable prefab home.

“I always try to clarify affordable housing versus affordable architecture,” Engheben says. “What we provide is affordable architecture. The custom homes we build start a $300 a square foot and go up to as much as $1000. We can do these for $200 a square foot that gives you the same level of detail and quality that you’ll find in a custom home.”

 

Behind the numbers:

Project Name: The Tim Palen at Shadow Mountain

Photography by: Jack Parsons Photography

Architect: Ecotechdesign, Walter Scott Perry, AIA

Builder: 44 West Construction, Eric Engheben

Project location: The Mojave Desert, Joshua Tree, CA.

Project type: Custom Single Family Home

Project Design: Modern; Sustainable

Date started: May 2010

Date completed: February 2011

Construction methods: Fabricated shipping containers and a pre-fabricated steel engineered building

Number of containers used: Six

Container dimensions: 20 ft long x 8 ft wide, with 8’6” ceilings

Container size: 160 sq. ft.

Total House size: 2300 sq ft

Total living space: 900 square feet

Steel building/ studio dimensions: 36 ft x 24, with added shipping container

Studio size: 1000 sq. ft.

Outdoor, “Desert Living Room”: 400 sq. ft.

Number of Bedrooms: 1

Number of Baths: 1.5

Lot size: 2.5 acres

Climate: High Desert: Hot and Dry

Elevation: 2700 feet

Average annual temperatures:

Average yearly low temperature: 340F

Average yearly high temperature: 1000F

Yearly rainfall: 4.57 inches

Annual rain days: <10 days

Annual sunshine: 350 days

 

Project Specs:

Exterior construction: ISO Shipping Containers; steel studs; wood studs; Butler, pre-engineered building

Exterior siding: Existing container; corrugated metal siding

Interior sheathing: Plywood, with skim coat

Flooring:

Living Space: Existing container plywood flooring, sanded and sealed with water-based polyurethane

Stairs: Mahogany plywood

Studio: Polished concrete

Foundation:

Living Space: Stem walls and piers

Studio: Slab on grade

HVAC: Forced air, split-unit heat /cooling pump

Sustainable/ Green Amenities:

Double-plumbed grey water irrigation system

Rain water harvesting, with 3,000 gallon storage tank

 R-Values:

Walls: R26 / California code: R19

Ceiling: R40 / California code: R30

Finished price, per square foot: $150

 

July 2011
BuilderNews Magazine
Feature: Construction Market Analysis

 

Lost Illusions

How the Real Estate Jitters have Reshaped Rental Housing

 

In early 2011, New York City interior designer Darren Henault, owner of Darren Henault Interiors, was working on two different development projects in the city. The first, for the developer Vanguard Investors, is the re-imagining of a six-story apartment building in the East Village. The second, for Cogswell Realty LLC, is the new construction of a seven-story apartment cooperative in Harlem. One of the key differences between these two projects, besides their locations, is that the East Village project, once completed, will remain rental apartments, while the Harlem apartments will be sold at market rates. What makes these projects remarkably similar, however,  is just how much the current real estate market and a shift in urban demographics have influenced Henault’s designs.

Henault is a New York City designer. He also works in LA. Urbanity is his canvas. And for the fifteen years he has worked as a designer, space has always been at a premium. It is the consequence of having more than eight million people crammed into a city the size of Austin, Texas — population 790,000. Designing small is what Henault does. “I think New York designers and architects have become very adept at using every square inch of space that is available to them,” Henault says, “because of what the cost per square foot is.” This has made New York city apartments the epitome of small, and yet, says Henault, he’s recently noticed a change in the market. New York city apartments, it seems, are getting even smaller. And New York is not alone. Across the country, as foreclosures increase and home sales decline, forcing a rise in the demand for rental apartments, the average size of those apartments appears to be shrinking.

Tom Shoup is the eastern director for Wood Partners, one of the largest builders of multifamily housing in the US, and Shoup points to one leading factor now currently driving Wood Partners’ development goals. That factor is the anticipated arrival of echo-boomer generation, or more precisely, the estimated 80 million baby-boomer children, born between 1980 and the mid-90s, who will over the coming years graduate from grad schools, colleges and high schools and be looking for a place to live. The last time the real estate industry saw a boom of this magnitude was in the late 60s and early 70s with the coming of age of the baby boomers. And it is this boom that we just recently seen the end of.

But, as Shoup notes, not even that tells the whole story. If this surge in home-buying population were viewed through the rosy lenses of just five years ago, we may well have seen a continuation of the sprawling suburbs and an increase in the demand for the once-coveted single-family home. But, as it goes, it is not five years ago, and a lot has changed since then. The housing market has taken a wallop. New home starts dropped to a 70-year low in 2009, with just 580,000 new homes built nationwide. The average price of a US home fell by nearly a third since 2006. The echo-boomers, like many of us, are skittish. The home was once the gold nugget of a family’s net worth, but for many that confidence is gone. As of May 2011, Zillow Inc., a Seattle-based real estate listing company, reported that 27 percent of US homeowners owed more on their home than the home was worth. Add to this the nation’s pockets of depression-level unemployment and the immobility of homeownership, and Shoup predicts than many one-time or potential homebuyers will simply opt out of the market and choose to rent instead.

Architect Mark Humphreys, CEO of Humphreys & Partners Architects and a recognized authority on multifamily housing, shares Shoup analysis of the market. Humphrey’s estimates that if the percentage of homeownership in the US dropped by just 10 percent over the coming years, this would add over 7.4 million new renters to the market. He also estimates that because of the economic downturn there is a significant pent up demand from renters who have stayed out of the market and will enter again as the economy improves. To this, Humphries then adds an estimated nine million echo boomers entering the market a year, together with the potential for their parents — the 74 million baby boomers— to downsize from the family home and into apartments, condos, and senior housing, all of which he expects will drive up demand for rentals.

And still there is more. Humphries, whose firm is headquartered in Dallas but works throughout the country, has also noticed an important shift in social attitudes, which he predicts will have an equally important impact on US housing. Humphries calls this shift in attitudes the “Manhattanization of the United States,” and he sees it as characterized by an increased demand, especially among the younger demographic, for a more urban lifestyle. The reason for this shift, according to Humphries, is due to a number of factors, the most important of which are the spike in fuel prices and increasing environmental concerns, along with the fading panache of a suburban life. This too, says Humphries, is driving up the demand for apartments, while helping to drive down the average size. “What we are seeing,” he says, “is that younger people coming out of college want to be in the cool hip areas and are willing to take much smaller apartments to get their rents down to an affordable range.”

 Building to this New Market

When Henault’s clients, Vanguard Investors, first considered the redesign of their East Village apartments, the New York City rental market was still fairly strong, demand was high, and the expectation of renters was still in throes of the housing bubble. People wanted big and the bigger the better.  The original plans for the building laid-out a single, 1500-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment per floor.  “Not grand,” Henault says, “but a larger and more luxurious apartment that would command much larger rent.” The upsides to this, he notes, are that the units would fetch higher rents and be easier to managed and maintain with fewer tenants. But, before the project went into construction, much of that had changed. As Henault’s notes, the reality of the East Village market couldn’t be ignored. “This was the East Village and the real estate market had been tanking for years,” Henault says. This led Henault and the developers to reconsider their plans and to realize, as Henault explains, that “there will be, in the coming years, more people who can afford smaller, lower priced housing than there will be who can afford luxurious apartments.”

The developers decided  to scrap their original plans, and they chose instead to divide each floor into three smaller units: a 425-square-foot studio, a 500-square-foot one bedroom and, through an impressive feat of space efficiency, a remarkable 550-square-foot two bedroom.  “This is not low income housing,” Henault says. “We still use high-end finishes.” Rather, the apartments are being tailored to young, urban professionals — the echo boomers, with money and incomes, but not so much as to afford a large apartment.  The approach that Henault and developers took was to maintain a certain level of upscale appeal, while reducing the space for more affordability. Henault achieved this by centering the design around the main living space and minimizing the reduction of space where it mattered most—the kitchen and living room—while stealing space from the places he felt he could. “People want the main living area to be the bulk of the square footage,” he explains, “so they don’t feel like they are on top of one another when they are in one room. But when everyone goes to their bedroom at night, a 10ft by 14ft room is fine.”

On the national level, Shoup, whose company generally builds in smaller cities and suburbs, contends that if there is a statistical shrinking in the average size of apartments, it s not that the sizes are actually getting smaller, but that developers are building more studios and one bedrooms, versus larger, two and three bedrooms apartments. This, Shoup contends, is what is forcing down the overall averages. “Urban markets,” he says, “appeal to the 24 to 32-year-old range who don’t have a lot of possessions yet and who work better with these smaller types of units.”

Humphries, who often works in large urban centers, is not so sure. He has watched apartments shrink in size over the last 20 years. It makes sense, he says, real estate is expensive. “Twenty years ago, it was at about a 1000-square-foot average, then about 15 years ago, it was 900-square-foot average. Five years ago it was about an 850 average, and today we’re seeing it into dip into a 750 average. And I think it is going to get smaller,” Humphries says.

Whatever the reason for the shrinking, for Henault, Humphries and Shoup, the challenge is the same: How do you make these smaller, often tiny apartments, both cost effective and appealing to this new and trending market. Shoup says that the most obvious and important approach is the use of the open floor plan. Wood Partners eliminates kitchen wall in smaller apartment, replaces it with kitchen islands and half-walls, and other scraps altogether the hard definitions of living and dining areas. This, Shoup notes, not only increases the perception of space in an apartment, it also provides a greater degree of functional flexibility, which then opens the appeal of the apartment to a broader range of potential renters. “So,” he says, “rather than having really hard, designated areas, for example a dining room, we build a space that could be a dining room. It could be a den. It could be a home office.”

In The Woodlands, Texas, a multifamily development project just north of Houston, Humphreys & Partners Architects is working with Cambridge Development Group and USAA Real Estate and demonstrating that luxury and size are not, by any means, mutually exclusive.  The project, Boardwalk at Town Center, once complete, will contain 450 premium apartments, some of which will be highly space efficient, yet elegantly designed, 340-square-foot studios.

“Designing 340-square-foot units causes you to be very innovative,” Humphreys says, adding that the only truly fixed space in any apartment is the bathroom. In one studio design, Humphreys & Partners includes an electric fireplace (“for effect”) built in to the back, lower portion of a closet. The fireplace is open to the front and side, which creates a greater feeling of depth and space in the unit, as one looks from the living area, through the fireplace and into the far corner of the kitchen. In another, slightly larger unit, a 558-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment, Humphries & Partners uses an open half wall between the bedroom and the living area and a closed soffit above the kitchen island, both of which help divide the rooms without constricting the space.

“Just because it’s small doesn’t mean you are not doing something attractive,” Humphreys says, “These people are smart, and they want to live in something cool.”

Shoup agrees. The bottom line, he says is that “the things (echo boomers) are interested in is not the things their parents were interested in. What they really want is an interesting home in an interesting community that they can live in and that says something about them and their lifestyle.

“I think,” he adds, “that a lot of people have stopped measuring their success by the ownership of a home, and that certainly plays well into the apartment market… And it is why apartments are now the place to be.”