Optimism, Redux

People sometimes say you have to be mad to want to build your own house. Such thoughts are often uttered, with exasperation, just when things are going terribly wrong. Well, now it’s our turn to emote.

We hired our general contractor way back in September of last year. Since then we have been working on finalizing the design with him. We say “working”, but it would more accurately be described as “waiting”. Waiting for information, waiting for construction details, waiting for answers.

There wasn’t that much we were asking our contractor to do, but after four months we could wait no longer. So we fired his non-delivering ass!

Where does that leave us now? With someone new of course. Granted, this will set us back another couple of months as we re-introduce the project to our “new guy”, wait for a build estimate and work to finish the final drawing set. But hey, it feels good to be moving forward again.

We are, lest we jinx ourselves, finally optimistic ground will soon be broken.

Kitchen Craft

We are aiming to build a clean, welcoming kitchen that feels rustic and homely - a relaxed kitchen that is as much for living and entertaining as it is for cooking.  If not too stymied by cost, we aim to achieve this vision through the use of steel, lightly varnished wood and local limestone.

Similar to the b2 kitchen system from Bulthaup pictured below, we are treating our kitchen cabinets like furniture in order to create a space that feels more like a living or dining room than a kitchen.  We’ve decided to avoid placing cabinets above counter height and to fashion those we do have as modified credenzas. By lifting the cabinetry off the ground, we can also mitigate the numbers of rodents and cockroaches that nest in dark unreachable places.

System b2 from Bulthaup

Our fridge and pantry will be contained in a single wooden cabinet that we are designing to look a bit like a standalone armoire. We have the basic concept down and are now focused on massaging the details (who knew designing door handles was such a tedious task) and fine-tuning the overall look of our pantry unit.

Northwest perspective of our kitchen

As for sitting and socializing, a table and bench seat along one wall will give us a place to flesh out recipes and sip on a glass of wine without getting in the way of any dinner preparations.

Southeast perspective of our kitchen

There is still lots to do.  We’re not yet happy with the placeholder door handles we’ve inserted in the renders above, and have no idea where the compost bucket will go.  But all-in-all, we’re on the right track and can now put this aside for a bit while we tackle the bedrooms.

Scouring the Pantry for Ideas

The new year brings thoughts of our kitchen. With a high-sloped ceiling and original french terracotta tile roof, our kitchen is a bit rustic and charming. The question we are currently wrestling with is how to design a kitchen that fits the existing character of the room while blending well with the rest of the house.

First step - look for inspiration. One obvious idea is a hacienda-style kitchen typical of the grand houses built a few hundred years ago. Used predominantly by servants, in a time before running water and microwave ovens, these kitchens functioned very differently to the way we cook today.

This, of course, should not hold us back. Couldn’t we adapt this style to our modern life? Certainly plenty of people have.

The kitchen at Los Dos cooking school in Mérida

For us, the problem with such kitchens is that they are re-creationist dreams. Dressed up with intricate Puebla tile (thanks Frida Kahlo), ornate extractor fans and polished copper pots dangling from the ceiling, these kitchens are dramatic set pieces. Dressed up to woo guests with high drama, they create the fantasy of a hacienda lifestyle. A lifestyle of what - a rich servant perhaps?

Granted, there are many examples of such kitchens that look great and work well. It is, however, not the right idea for our stripped down, relaxed minimalist design ethic. We spend a lot of time in our kitchen and need a functional space to whip up a nice meal while remaining relaxed enough to suit our hideaway aesthetic.

We also want a space that won’t drive us mad with ornateness. Maybe we should consider a modern gourmet kitchen with clean lines and plenty of counter space?

This sleek gourmet kitchen screams modern minimalism and we love it. Although we’ve dreamed of hiring the designers at Boffi to bless our kitchen with their products (and pay an arm and a leg in the process), we know in the end this style of kitchen is simply wrong for our house. With its sleek lines and 21st-Century materials, this kitchen is anything but rustic. It would, in the end, sit uncomfortably in our house, scoffing at our old-world terracotta tiles.

Our kitchen is rustic and we need to respect that. At the same time, our house is modern and minimalist, so we need a kitchen that reflects that as well. So perhaps it’s time for some modern rustic inspiration?

A kitchen in Perigord Nord, France by Greet and Armand

This kitchen represents where we’re heading. It’s relaxed and clean with a whiff of rustic. The open shelving and lack of high cabinets give it a relaxed, livable feeling. The lightly varnished wood and stone floor evoke the idea of a slower time without being specific. The cabinetry feels like furniture, equally at home in a dining room and the kitchen. It is in such a space that we imagine ourselves comfortably passing the time of day.

Let There be Strip Lights

We’ve spent the last week trying to produce an image of what our living room might look like at night with all the lights on. After setting up our 3D model and hitting the render button on Tuesday night, we went to sleep expecting the thing to be finished by the morning. Seven hours later, the damn thing was only 20% complete.  We knew renders with multiple light sources took a long time, but we weren’t expecting this!

Time for a new plan.  To convey the idea of what we’re thinking in terms of lighting, we’ll go with these images from one of our favorite UK architects, John Pawson.  This master of minimalism achieves some great effects without clutter.

In a similar vein, we plan to embed lights (in our case, LED strip and fluorescent tube lights) along ventilation gaps between our walls and ceilings.  Like the images above, we are aiming for subtle lines of overhead light.  Combined with floor lights cut out of the base of our walls and more light hidden strategically behind various shelves and furniture, we should have sufficient ambient lighting to guide you comfortably through the house.

To achieve this we project that we will install nearly 200 feet of LED and fluorescent lights.  The benefits here are many.  By hiding our primary source of ambient light, we don’t need to buy expensive bulbs or fret over the aesthetics of fixtures (which in our case tends to swing us toward very expensive units).  The embedded lights will also provide even lighting throughout, allowing us to avoid the harsh spots that come with overhead halogen cans.

And finally, LED and fluorescent lights are up to 10 times as energy efficient, leading to significant cost savings on our electric bills.  They also emit far less heat than halogens and incandescents.  Given the climate here, not having to put a dozen “halogen heaters” into each room will lower our AC bills and make living more comfortable.

Down a Lighting Rabbit Hole

When we started two months back, creating a lighting plan for our house seemed simple.  With a sprinkling of recessed halogen cans and a pendant over the dining table, our first draft was complete - an even wash of mostly overhead light from around 100 fixtures. How fantastic were we.

(Un)fortunately, a trip to our favorite architecture bookstore corrupted our innocence.  Works such as Lighting by Design told a tale of complexity that spun our heads.

After much reading, we realized our plan was basically crap and we needed to start over.  This time around we calculated our lumens, created interest in the shadows and struck a good balance between ambient, task, accent, and decorative lights. We felt good again.

Next task - find the fixtures to fill each spot in the plan.  Hitting the road, we found a lot to like.  Highlights included a gorgeous green pendant from Eurofase ($1300 US)

along with a wall sconce ($450 US).

After our third lighting store, reality was starting to set in.  Our plan had 8 to 10 fixtures per room.  At the rate we were going, our entire budget would be blown on the living room alone.

Back to the drawing board.  Our new task - assume the lights we buy will be cheap and ugly, and then figure out a way to hide every single one of them.

After a week of lighting hide and seek, our new best friend was LED rope light.  As well as being super energy efficient, you can buy 150 feet of it for under $500.  By running it along ventilation shafts and above rafters, we were able to remove nearly all the expensive fixtures.

We also decided to cut square holes in the concrete walls of our house and tuck lights up into the cavities (see below).  As they will be completely hidden, we can use unsightly compact fluorescent bulbs.

After two months down the lighting rabbit hole, we have finally done it.  A well-illuminated house for around $1000 worth of fixtures.  This should give us a little money to spare for a pendant or two - a pretty green one perhaps.

Not Digging the Pool

It’s time to design our rear garden, the long neglected stepchild of our central courtyard.  For the last few months we have pictured a lengthy lap pool - in which we toil daily on our new-found Athenian physiques.

Taking a hard look at the space (and our feelings toward strenuous exercise), we realize that 12 meters of blue will annex our goal of a lush garden space. Although it’s nice to drop the length of one’s “lap pool” into conversation, it’s simply not enough.

The second thing we realized was that by building the pool flush with the ground, we were increasing our construction costs by close to $10,000 USD.  Crazy, huh?

As we mentioned before, Mérida sits on solid limestone.  As such, to make a 1.4 meter-deep hole in the ground means explosives.  As the only way to the rear garden is through the front door, it also means digging and hauling those 40 cubic meters of exploded rock by hand. Put together, this means mucho dinero.

To make things better, we changed the pool to a rectangle that measures approximately 4x7 meters.  Not much of a reduction in overall size, but it allows us to shift the pool toward the center of the space and surround it with garden.  We also raised the pool and surrounding garden by 60cm. Not only will this mean less digging, but evacuated rock can now be used to raise up the garden, saving both our money and carbon footprint.

The “diorama-style” renders above illustrate our current thinking. It’s a pain to render realistic foliage, so imagine lush planting everywhere depicted in green. Imagine hard enough and you realize that from the kitchen, you will barely see the pool. Green trumps blue, just the way we want it.

It’s early days yet, so expect to see more developments. Until then, let us know what you think.

Framing the Courtyard

The look of the central courtyard is shaping up. Here is an image looking straight out through the mosquito screens toward the east wall. If you imagine some vines on the wall and a few trees and philodendrons for good measure, you can start to picture the framed views that inspired us on a recent visit to the Kampong Garden in Florida.

Each day, design ideas come and go. Since yesterday, you will notice we have replaced the terracotta tile in the courtyard with a local limestone called Concheula (or shell stone). The terracotta was a little “grandma” and so we chucked it (see below for an updated view). If only real construction was this easy.

Time to Get Serious

Our base design is complete.  Our builder is hired.  It’s now time to make some hard choices regarding wall and floor finishes, column details, overhangs, and exposed structural connections.  In tandem, we also need to firm up the ethereal ideas we have about various systems - lighting, drainage, solar, etc. - that will make the building comfortable.  So much to do.

First up - materials.  Until now, our 3-D renders of the house have all been in a single color and not terribly realistic.  This image is such a shot, depicting the western side of our inner courtyard (to capture the entire courtyard, we had to set the “camera” 15 meters back from our property - making it quite unrealistic because the adjacent buildings would technically be in the way).

Yesterday, we started rendering with colors, depicting materials with a simple palette.  We decided on white to represent lime-washed walls, orange for terracotta floors, and dark brown for steel, including the mosquito screen doors and other accents like handrails and building trims.

What a difference.  Previously we had always felt this perspective of our house was pretty ugly.  With base colors in, the building is transformed.  We are starting to see some strong horizontal lines to match the length of our site.  With the addition of dark colors, the mosquito screens dissolve allowing the two sides of the courtyard to mesh together more fully.  By defining some extra detail, shadows are emerging to provide texture and depth.

Here are a few additional shots of the courtyard from under the covered living area.  We definitely think it’s starting to come together!

The End of (What Feels Like) an Era

We can finally say we’ve hit a significant milestone. After months of work, the core design of the house is now complete.  There are still a ton of little details to decide upon (like lighting placement, door patterns, and such), but the heavy lifting is behind us.

Posted below is a set of the key plans and sections.  Let us know your thoughts.

We now have to take the next (scary) step and hire a builder! To that end, we met with someone this morning to get a feel for their process. It’s kind of like dating, except that at the end of the relationship, we’ll get to keep the house.

The Plans:

Some Sections:

Ensuring You Want It Enough

On one side of our eat in kitchen, we have a large 3x3m opening that looks out into the rear garden.  Our plan is to transform this gap into a key “money shot” moment in our design.  But how?

Looking around for inspiration, we found the pavilion at the Kampong Gardens in Coconut Grove, Florida.

Between brick columns, the architect has decided to erect wooden frames with no glass or screens.  It’s purely ornamental and fantastic.

The frames transform an otherwise typical line of columns into a series of windows that outline the garden beyond.  By creating this false barrier, the garden feels like it sits apart, heightening your sense of longing.  As they say, distance makes the heart grow fonder.