What to Build and How to Build it? Pt.3

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In a previous note, I explained that familia tres_arboles cycled through a variety of chalet or "A-frame" styled house designs. In addition, we began to investigate a variety of prefabrication methodologies for house construction. In this note, tres_arboles will fill in the blanks on the progression of our design sensibility and come to grips with some of the realities of building a house on the Washington Coast that enhance the challenge of this project. Now lest there be any confusion about what tres_arboles means when mentioning an A-frame Chalet, here is a typical representation from Lindal Cedar Homes, manufacturers of beautiful house kits: By all representations, these are fantastic getaway houses with wide open living spaces conducive to robust socializing, cooking, drinking, fete'ing, and the group singing of bawdy rugby songs around a roaring fire. Alas, familia tres_arboles increasingly saw these houses as balloons containing far too much volume for the amount of living space provided. Furthermore, if our property were going to afford a view of the Pacific Ocean, it would probably only do so from a second story. A quick review of floorplans typical of chalets reveals that the otherwise desirable "loft" space above the living room is often, if not always, tucked into the rear of house, constricting the lateral extent of any view the home might possess: Beyond that major detraction, every builder tres_arboles spoke to seemed happy to build a customer one of these things, but to a man they roundly considered these houses a pain-in-the-ass to build. Between the steep pitched roofs and 24 feet or more linear distance from floor to ceiling at the roof peak in the great room, they require more scaffolding and put builders at higher exposure than other typical vacation home builds. All of this adds up to higher per-square-foot construction costs for less livable space and all without maximizing view potential. So familia tres_arboles continued to scan the internet and the cable television house and home programs for notions that would inform a smarter, efficient, more stylish design that could be built on a more "modern" platform. "Prefabrication" became our watchword as we discovered FabPreFab and livemodern.com. We grew increasingly excited by the ideas whizzing around our heads as we explored the first "Dwell House" competition and began picking through the various firms designing specifically for prefabrication such as Michelle Kaufman (Glidehouse) and Charlie Lazor (Flatpak). Boundaries expanded as we looked into the firm that designed the first winning Dwell House, Resolution 4 Architecture. Prefabrication of any one of the multitude of supercool modern-look homes these entities represent would have met several criteria for our specific project. First, we thought we were building in a rural, rusted out, coastal Washington fishing/ surfing village with a limited construction workforce. This was no small obstacle in the mind of tres_arboles, driving nearly every decision related to the project, especially cost. Prefabrication actually meant we might be able to at least "dry-in" a house and then finish using the labor of family tradesmen, at our own pace, all minimizing the need to locate and hire local labor (limited to lot development and at most, erecting the prefabricated elements of the house). That is, we could probably act as General Contractors, hiring and scheduling the site preparation while we awaited our boxes or panels or what-have-you comprising our house and hope to locate a local or at least regional crew that could crane the elements onto the prepared site. However, while each of the prefab protagonists presented as exciting outfits creating downright sexy house design, every email, phone conversation, magazine article, and internet newsletter led to the same place: the delivered pricing for the prefabricated elements of the house alone were equal to or greater than the highest of the highest end of the custom construction market in Washington (except for the greater Puget Sound metropolitan area). At the same time, the other side of that oh-so-sexy design coin is the fact that several of these design, especially the modular prefab ones really depend on laying eash module side-by-side to gain livable space. I mean (and here's where tres_arboles starts to tick some of you readers off) the foundational glidehouse module makes for a nice little cabin, but at $160 a square foot, it makes at most a nice getaway but not an authentic second home environment. So as the vision of the familia tres_arboles beach house progressed, we increasingly clarified that we wanted an efficient second house but one that would function equally well as a first house. By this time in our thinking, we were examining modern designers and architects offering licenses to their "stock" plans that while requiring custom engineering (and probably redrafting), would enable us to explore the use of a couple of regional builders using different prefabrication techniques. At the same time, we could acquire the right to build a truly modern design from the intellectual endeavor of an authentic architect. After a variety of looks, we began to correspond with Greg LaVardera. Working with Greg offered us two options (at the very least): 1) buying a plan and developing it with either a) a custom builder or b) one of the two local prebrication outfit, and 2) developing a design based on Greg's Common Modular concept (which I'd link here but these pages appear to have been removed from livemodern.com). After some probative attempts to get something going on the common modular (about which wife of tres_arboles was exceptionally fired-up), we pared down our assessment of what we might actually end up gettig built, and bough a plan. Next: When is a deck house really a plat house and why can't tres_arboles get these guys to build him one?