Favorite architecture of the 2010s (part four): new houses

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It's time to talk houses in this continuing series of posts highlighting some of my architectural favorites of the past decade.

But in this case, If I'm talking great houses, it could refer to a tower, a village, a warehouse, a glass cube, a music box, and in one case not a home per se but a HOMB. Maybe it's my own bias, but I'm often not talking about a house with a huge garage in front. I'm talking about slender but not skinny. I'm talking about clients ranging from John & Yoko to a group of homeless women. I'm talking about new construction and remodels alike.

When I look at my list of favorite single-family residences, it's at 17 projects and counting, and the first thing I notice is that only a handful are single-family houses that are site-built from the ground up on traditional lots and not classified as accessory dwelling units, skinny lots or other types of dwellings. That may say something about my own architectural tastes and interests. I do love a mid-century modern renovation, or bringing an old bungalow alive. Or it might say something about the existing housing stock in Portland. There aren't many vacant residential lots left in Portland proper, and not everyone has the stomach (or wallet) to tear down a perfectly good little house just to build a new one.

For now, let's look at just these new single-family houses. I should specify that I'm restricting the conversation here to houses in the Portland metro area. And as always, this is not a list of the six best. There are always great projects out there that I miss. (Please tell me what they are!) These are just five I got to see and really liked.

Let's start in no particular order with Ash + Ash by Hennebery Eddy Architects. It's the home of firm co-founder Tim Eddy.

Ash + Ash (Josh Partee)

Completed in 2014 and winner of AIA Portland's 2030 Challenge design award for its sustainable features, it's the recipient of a LEED Platinum rating due to its highly-insulated thermal envelope, geo-exchange heat pump system, under-floor radiant heating, a rainwater reclamation system with for domestic and potable use, triple-glazed windows and deep overhangs.

But none of that occurred to me when I visited Eddy's home so much as its resemblance to the iconic Case Study Houses constructed in mid-century Los Angeles. The use of naturally stained wood cladding to compliment the white stucco on the exterior helps mark this as a Pacific Northwest home, but the house's glass and horizontality still for me harken back to those gems.

I also was a fan of the Music Box Residence by Scott|Edwards Architecture. The first thing I always remember about the house is that it was designed for two musicians named John and Yoko. Alas, it's obviously not that John and Yoko, but the house itself is what you might call a Double Fantasy.

Music Box Residence (Pete Eckert)

The clients both perform as classical musicians and tutor young musicians. “It’s two boxes with a lot of glass connecting them,” firm principal Rick Berry told me for a Gray magazine article. “You’ve got kids, a family, different types of music going on. There’s so much that has to go on in the space, so there’s a lot of flexibility.”

Another favorite from the last ten years was Tower House by Waechter Architecture, completed in 2013. Constructed on the steep slope of a ravine, a lot that had never been developed because it was thought to be unbuildable, the footprint is only about 538 square feet. But instead of cantilevering outward, the Tower House, as its name indicates, goes upward. I love that while it's an unassailably crisp, contemporary design, what it most resembles is a medieval fortified tower. Even so, the exterior cladding in black corrugated metal, with radiused corners to eliminate the need for corner trim, is vintage Waechter.

The four story house mostly treats each floor as its own room, so the design doesn't feel confining. The living room and kitchen occupy the top two floors to take advantage of the view, while the master bedroom is nestled at the bottom. Because it's such a small footprint, the natural light is amazing, and so are the views.

Tower House (Lara Swimmer)

Of course this is just one of several houses by Waechter Architecture from 2010-2019 that I could have named, and as it happened, we're not quite done with the firm as it relates to this series of posts; you'll see them again in a post about ADUs and alternative-lot houses. And I could have picked a couple other houses by the firm on traditional lots. In fact, I'd argue that Waechter Architecture has been the premiere single-family home designer of the decade in Portland. There are other individual houses by other architects that are just as compelling, but to my mind nobody built so many excellent houses as Waechter in the 2010s.

Next there's the Rahman Residence by Scott Pitek. The lot in North Portland that Pitek had to work with was nearly ten times the 500-square-foot footprint of the Tower House. But it did already have a house on it. Instead of tearing down the circa-1919 bungalow, Pitek's design took advantage of the fact that the original house was situated at the back of the lot and simply went up next to it. It wasn't built on an expensive budget, either: about $122 per square foot.

Rahman wanted a modern house that could also fit unobtrusively into the existing neighborhood of homes built between the 1890s and the 1930s. And that it does. Completed in 2012 and clearly of our time, this gabled house has a classic feel to it, and the steep pitch of the roof allows its attic to become habitable space. What's more, Pitek's design makes inexpensive materials like Hardie panel siding sing by employing a simple lap that gives the facade texture.

"The first thing I did was spend a month with her just trying to understand her, her goals, what her style and aesthetic was—not just in on a superficial level but her aesthetic of living," Pitek says. "We also asked how could that align with creating a mutual house? I say ‘mutual’ in the sense that it’s appealing to anybody, it’s laid out in a way that’s flexible, you can add walls in certain locations, and it’s logical. We wanted to create a shell that she could live in but that at the same time had no market detraction if she ever wanted to sell it. That, basically, was the goal."

"We thought, What are some of the really simple, classic forms of structures, and there was the simple gabled-roof house," Pitek explained in a 2014 Dwell article by William Lamb. "She didn’t want to build a basement, so we thought, okay, a gabled-roof house is great because you’ve got all your storage up in the attic."

Rahman Residence (Steven Scardina)

It's a bit of a stretch to include the Karuna House by Holst Architecture in a list of Portland or even Portland metropolitan area residences. I mean, it's in the country outside Newberg, in Yamhill County. I grew up near these parts, in McMinnville, and I never think of these towns as being part of Portland. Yet the reality is they've become a bedroom community for the city, and so I'm using that as an excuse to include what's an incredibly green home.

In fact, Karuna House is the first building to be receive a Platinum LEED for Homes rating from the US Green Building Council, achieve Passive House PHIUS+ certification, and registration with the Swiss MINERGIE rating system. It's actually the first MINERGIE-certified building in North America. All this, and it's a net-zero energy house too, thanks to a large onsite array of solar panels. Astonishingly, thanks to its robust building envelope and high-performance windows, the house uses 90 percent less energy than a conventional home designed to code.

Karuna House (Jeremy Bittermann)

"We knew we wanted to push the boundaries in terms of design, which you don’t see as often with passive houses, especially in the US," Holst co-founder Jeff Stuhr explained in a Gray magazine article. "That, right off the bat, was appealing to us. Could we break the code, so to speak?"

"Meeting these different rating systems' strictures at the same time added an almost ridiculous degree of difficulty, and even just building to Passive House standards alone impacted a lot of design decisions. "There was quite a bit of complex modeling done with where the materials had to come together, and what we needed to do to hold this stuff without creating huge thermal bridges between inside and outside. In school we learned bout tectonics and expressing the structure," Stuhr added in a Portland Architecture Q&A. "In Passive House it’s not impossible but you have to be much more deliberate, and much more careful about the envelope and what becomes interior versus exterior structure, almost to the point where they never touch. You’ll see in the living room or bedroom where we might have buried the steel on the outside wall within the window wall. We had to keep it completely inside because steel is such a terrible conductor."

One other house to achieve Passive House certification comes to mind: the Skidmore Passivhaus by In Situ Architecture, led architect Jeff Stern. Somewhat uncommonly for a Passive House, it's actually comprised of two separate buildings, accessed through an unheated passageway. But this is a live-work scenario, so it makes sense. And for a house that's all about staying tightly sealed, there is nevertheless a strong connection to the outdoors, thanks to large expanses of glass.

Skidmore Passivhaus (Jeremy Bittermann)

This house is so well insulated, in fact, that Stern and his wife, who occupy the house, barely even need any heating. "It's the equivalent of four hair driers and yet we were perfectly comfortable," the architect said in a 2014 Portland Architecture interview.

Looking at this quintet of houses, what do they have in common? The first thing I noticed is that four out of five have flat roofs. All five are generally comprised of a whole lot of rectangles. But then again, aside from pitched roofs, aren't most all houses? Weirdly given its uncommonness as a design feature, two of these houses are entered via small bridges. Two of them alternate beautiful natural-wood cladding and white stucco, and two have some kind of charred or darkly stained wood cladding, but two make use of more inexpensive, utilitarian siding materials.

Next I plan to write about some of the stand-alone houses I omitted here: ADUs, etc. But if there's a great house I've missed, please let me know. There have already been a few stragglers among the offices and institutional buildings I've written about for this favorite-architecture-of-the-2010s series, so these lists can always be amended. The point is to share and revisit designs that are compelling and endure.

Funnily enough, I've never owned a home of my own, and since leaving my parents' McMinnville house for college in 1990, I've never even lived in a rented house. In all those 30 years, it's been dorm rooms at first and then a succession of apartments. But you know what? We just got pre-approved. Single-family houses are destined to no longer comprise such a high percentage of dwellings. In the future, more and more will live in higher-density housing. Yet the pull of one's own house remains strong. I can't wait to read my book on the front porch.