Portland Architecture: Small Spaces/Big Ideas home tour coming October 3

Every year the popular Street of Eames tour sells out its limited allotment of tickets with plenty of design aficionados left out in the cold unable to see the houses. So if you're looking to see some of the best contemporary residential designs in the city, the Small Spaces/Big Ideas home tour might be worth a Saturday afternoon.

In 1950, the average size of a single-family house in the U.S. was 983 square feet. By 2004, that average had ballooned to 2,349 square feet. Now that figure may begin to drop again. And these houses help show that this needn't be a bad thing.

Slated for October 3, the mall Spaces/Big Ideas tour (featuring homes under 1,800 square feet) is one of the kickoff events in the Portland Architecture & Design Festival happening throughout the month. There will also be a slew slough of other events, from the annual design awards to an architecture-oriented film series, lectures, and exhibits.

One house on the tour, the Rose House (pictured above), was either the first or one of the first houses in the United States to be built with net-zero energy usage. The little cottage designed by Clark Brockman and SERA Architects generates at least as much power as it uses.

Shortly after it was completed in 2004, the Rose House was featured in a Business Week magazine story called "Enter the New American Dream House." Olga Kharif wrote:

Four years ago, Linda Rose and her husband, Eldon Haines, realized it might soon be time to consolidate -- and reinvent -- their family living arrangements. The retired couple lives in Eugene, Ore., where they have to negotiate 46 stairs from curb to doorstep every time they venture out. So the couple decided to build their own version of a dream retirement home in Rose's daughter's backyard in Portland.

The two life-long environmentalists didn't want just another house, however. The pair already burned old newspapers and cardboard in their wood stove and recycled or reused all plastic. They're proud to boast that they have generated two garbage cans of waste a year for the past 20 years.

Haines, a nuclear physicist, has worked for decades as a consultant to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, most recently on the Mars Odyssey unmanned spacecraft. But he's also known nationwide as the inventor of the copper cricket, a solar water heater. "My real-life interest is the environment, not planet Mars," he likes to point out.

So it was only natural that the couple set out to build a home that generates all the energy it needs to run appliances, heating, and cooling. It's a pioneering effort in Oregon and one of the first in the nation.

These so-called net-energy homes go a step beyond the "zero-energy homes" promoted by the federal government, explains Charlie Stephens, residential energy specialist at the Oregon Energy Dept. in Salem. To qualify as zero-energy, a home need only generate enough electricity for 70% to 80% of its needs. The Rose House is energy self-sufficient, period.

Another tour stop is the Park Box (pictured below) by Path Architecture. The house was also included on the 11xDesign tour earlier this spring (which I wrote about for Dwell magazine as a kind of bellwether indicating a new Portland design generation), but back then it was still under construction. Today it's finished. I visited the Park Box a few weeks ago with its designer, Corey Martin of Path. I was impressed with its simple elegance, including a dramatic double-height living room that the bedrooms overlook as well as the house's geometry of interlocking cubes and its stained wood cladding.

The North House by William Kaven Architecture on North Vancouver Avenue was also on the 11xDesign tour, and was also under construction then. This firm, like Path, is also busy developing lots of its own projects. Trevor Lewis and Daniel Kaven of WKA are pictured here.

Harpoon House, an additional tour stop, is the first house of designer Matt Kirkpatrick. It's located on an urban infill lot in the Buckman neighborhood of Southeast Portland neighborhood of Buckman. The land, according to the house's website, "has existed for decades as an unadorned patch of neatly groomed lawn hosting a single hydrangea bush and a tidy chain link fence. It will soon be the site of Harpoon House – a small, efficient dwelling - and Harpoon Gardens – a diversity of native plants, trees, edibles, and possibly a few chickens."

Harpoon House (shown here in rendering form) features 704 square feet of living space and 448 square feet of unconditioned basement on 2,500 total square feet of land, with one bedroom and one bathroom, but also-interestingly-a root cellar and a rooftop garden. "Harpoon House," its site says, "was designed to encourage a fluid relationship between indoor and outdoor living," with "soil and plants instead of tar paper and asphalt shingles." The project is expected to be certified LEED Platinum.

Also included in Small Spaces/Big Ideas is the Le-Horsely House, by husband-wife architects Joann Le and David Horsely of DAO Architecture. The house was previously featured in Sunset magazine in a piece called "Rethinking the Classic Bungalow" by Jil Peters:

All over the West, homeowners are renovating old bungalows. Some meticulously mimic the original architecture; others create strikingly contemporary additions, sharply contrasting old and new. Architects Joann Le and David Horsley, a Portland couple, chose yet another approach. "We treated the renovation with a subtle touch that imbued a modern sensibility while respecting the home's character," says Horsley. And perhaps most important, they kept a good sense of humor along the way.

"With two architects in the house, there was no restraining voice of reason," laughs Horsley. "We turned a little fixer into a significant fixer." The couple has spent the last six years gradually transforming their 1913 bungalow from a collection of small, dark rooms to an open, airy, light-filled home. They did almost all of the work themselves--even making much of the furniture. "We certainly wish we had bought stock in Home Depot," says Le.

One of their first decisions was to remove a wall that divided a small kitchen and a tiny downstairs bedroom. Horsley had fond memories of the large kitchen and eating area in his grandmother's home, and he and Le wanted a similarly gracious space. "We use the kitchen in a modern way," explains Le. "We cook, eat, do the bills, and read the paper there." By opening up the room with large double-hung windows and a glass door, they gained access to sunlight and views.

Key to the success of the kitchen is a new rear porch that expands the area into the backyard. The couple finished it with the same fir flooring used inside, protecting the exposed section with spar urethane, a marine-grade finish available at most paint and hardware stores. To ensure that the porch ceiling wouldn't block light to the kitchen, Le and Horsley designed skylights between the rafters, giving them the best of both worlds. A series of openings in the interior walls lets in additional sunlight. "We're not sun worshippers or even beach people," Le says with a smile, "but capturing the light is really important to us."

The Small Spaces/Big Ideas homes tour takes place Saturday, October 3 from 10am-4pm. Tickets are $35, or $25 for students, and available at the AIA Center For Architecture, at 403 NW 11th Avenue.