Best Small Home 2019: Small and Skinny Spec Home
This 1650-sq.-ft. urban home challenges market norms with a thoughtful modern design.
BEST SMALL HOME: At about 1000 sq. ft. smaller than the average home built in 2018, our Best Small Home Award goes to Atlanta architect Alex Wu for his infill spec home. But it’s not the size of the home as much as the size of the lot that made this project challenging. Built on a 20-ft.-wide lot, the project’s success hinged on Alex winning a significant variance from the zoning board and still designing a comfortable home within a mere 14-ft. by 56- ft. footprint.
In 2016, Alex Wu decided to leave the large architecture firm—focused mostly on university buildings—where he had been working for over a decade. Competing with established developers and builders for a decent lot in the Atlanta area proved to be a challenge. But the reality was that many of the more ideal building lots wouldn’t be right for what Alex had in mind. He was planning to build a well-designed home that was both smart and small, and that had style but was still affordable. Alex’s project would be an outlier in a market where the norm for spec homes is to put as many square feet of home as possible on each lot, by building a big box of a house, with all the latest popular finishes, sold for a premium—an approach that is driving inflated property values in many urban centers.
The lot Alex ended up building on is a mere 20 ft. wide with an unmovable utility pole planted at the narrow street front. The local zoning setbacks would have allowed only a 6-ft.-wide home to be built on the property, so Alex’s first order of business was to apply for a variance. He got it, but the approved plan only allowed him to build a 14-ft.-wide house, which is still an awfully skinny structure. Alex was not discouraged. He was energized and was on a mission to prove that good design can overcome the many challenges facing today’s architects and builders who are working in urban areas where many of the available lots are infill and nonconforming with current zoning laws.
To get the variance he needed, Alex presented three design ideas to the board. The first was exactly what he didn’t want to build—a giant box as big as the lot would allow. But the design provided con-text for the other two options, which were variations on the same theme. Alex always offers more than two options for a design review. In his experience, two options present a choice of one or the other; more than two sparks a dialogue, which is exactly what happened.
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As he had hoped, the big-box option was largely ruled out and a discussion of the merits of each of the other designs allowed Alex to show that he was being thoughtful about how to best use the lot, which at the end of the day, got him the variance he needed.
Alex got a variance to reduce the side-yard setback from 7 ft. to 3 ft., and the zoning board also agreed to reduce the front-yard setback from 30 ft. to 10 ft. Many houses built in the neighborhood before the current zoning laws were adopted have 10-ft. setbacks. In this way, Alex’s house actually fits well into the neighborhood. He didn’t ask for a variance for the back of the property, which would be the only place left for an outdoor space. Despite the variance, Alex had to build a three-story house to get the minimal space he needed to make the spec home marketable to buyers.
The plan he settled on has a two-story modern wing at the front of the house inspired by a remodeled carriage house in London designed by architect Russel Jones. The back portion of the house is more traditional. The three-story gable form was informed by a home by Austrian architect Bernardo Ba-der. Though the modern brick cube was put at the front of the house to make a design statement and keep the home in scale with others nearby, both forms fit into the architecturally diverse Atlanta neighborhood.
ENTRYWAY
Alex was determined to keep the two styles distinctly separate, which he did by designing an entry to sit between the two. He would have liked the entry to be a glass atrium, but that would have blown the budget and made it difficult for him to meet the 1-hour fire rating for exterior walls built within 5 ft. of the property line. This code limits glass to 25% of the overall wall area. Instead, he painted the entry black and included some big windows to help it largely disappear in the overall context of the home.
The painted-black panel siding and trim on the entry’s exterior are fiber cement, as is the gray-painted board-and-batten siding and trim on the back of the house. Alex’s first choice for siding was shou sugi ban, but it proved to be too expensive. Because painting brick changes its permeability and hinders performance, he chose Boral Brick’s Magnolia Bay brick for the modern cube at the front of the house, which gave him the light color he was looking for without paint.
For continuity, Alex turned the exterior material into the house inside the entry, where the brick from the front of the house and the board-and-batten siding from the back of the house are used for the interior walls.
Inside, the effect is of two buildings being joined by the entry, which is also the stairwell from the first floor to the second floor and one of the areas where Alex chose to make a design statement. With large windows on both floors and on both sides of the house, the entry is light-filled and airy and the stair is the focal point.
Alex is a fan of using common materials and good craftsmanship to execute elegant design. The modern open-riser stair is a good example of this approach. The entire stair is made of maple ply-wood, including the treads, the solid guardrail walls, and the handrails.
CUSTOM ELEMENTS
Throughout the interior, Alex chose materials and colors for a combination of style and affordability. In the kitchen, for example, he decided it was worth the cost to bring in the maple plywood from the stairs and use it for paneling and cabinetry. Though there are many finish materials and paneling options that are far more expensive than maple plywood, most spec builders would prefer inexpensive drywall to any other wall or ceiling covering. This decision reflects Alex’s mission to show that spec houses and investment properties can still be designed and built with custom details. In contrast to the paneling, he used a simple suite of white appliances, which were affordable and work well color-wise in this design.
Though the rest of the walls in the house are white, the window and door casing is black and the interior doors are the same gray as the board-and-batten siding, tying more of the interior design to the exterior finishes. Alex doesn’t believe all interior trim must be one color. He also bucks the trend when it comes to doors; often they are made to disappear by painting them white or leaving them a natural wood tone. They can also be highlighted with color, which he chose to do here.
The one rule he did follow is to not use color to separate the floors from the walls. So, all of the baseboards are painted white. Except in the bathrooms, the floors throughout the house are white oak.
Perhaps the most interesting decision Alex made was to make the living room a two-story space. For most spec builders looking to maximize square footage and profit, it would have been a no-brainer to make the space above the living room into an additional bedroom. But according to Alex, small and more affordable homes and their owners deserve good design too. Including big-home details in small houses is a great way to make them feel spacious and special. The vaulted family room is a surprising and delightful detail in these tight quarters and one of many great tricks Alex used to make this home work.
Photos by Garey Gomez, except where noted. Floor plans by Patrick Welsh.
SPECS
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8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
1. Make a statement:
For many architects, it’s a mantra: Good design is born of constraints. Undeterred by the ridiculously narrow lot, or the need to keep the budget in check, the architect still made a clear design statement with this house by dividing it into two distinctive forms. A two-story modern cube is located near the street and a much larger three-story gable form sits to the back of the lot. To make a clear distinction between the two forms, they are separated by the entry, which is acts as a spacer. The modern aes-thetic is accentuated by a flat roof and a second-floor cantilever over one corner of the front of the house and the more traditional gable form is accentuated by parapet walls that create a crisp roofline as well as an exterior chimney. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
2. Offer protected parking:
The cantilevered second-story corner of the house required significant engineering and structural steel. While it certainly adds to the modern aesthetic, the design was born of function. On small city lots, garages are rarely a good use of space, and on this particular lot, a utility pole made much of the street front unavailable for parking. The cantilever creates enough space for a couple of cars to fit in the driveway, one of which gets covered parking. A shed roof from the carport to the entry keeps homeowners out of the weather as they walk around the corner to enter the house. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
3. Put the “front door” on the side of the house:
It’s not uncommon for zoning laws to require new homes to have street-facing front doors. Though that wasn’t the case here, allowing a side entry is a variance worth pursuing if you ever find yourself designing a skinny house like this. A main entry on the street-facing elevation of this home would have required a circulation corridor that ran the length of the house. With the entry located on the side of the house, no space is wasted on hallways. Inside the entry, there are rooms to the right and to the left. Straight ahead is the stair. The layout is efficient for small and narrow homes. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
4. Run the stairs perpendicular:
Stairs eat up a lot of area in a house and are always one of the trickier details to design. The architect found that in this case running the stairs perpendicular to the length of the house with a landing, and putting the stairs from the first to the second floor and from the second to the third floor in different locations, actually saved floor space. He used the main entry area for the stairs to the second floor and designed them to be a focal point in the home. The stairs from the second to the third floor make use of the two-story living room, with the last run of stairs hanging over that space. The only down-side to this approach, as opposed to running the stairs lengthwise and stacking them, is that it limits ceiling height as the stair runs must be kept short to fit within the narrow building width. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
5. Make some things big:
Many architects use this trick on small homes: They include just a few surprising details that are more common on larger homes. This might be adding a really big window, or using some stout columns or disproportionately large trim details. On this project, one of the enlarged details that makes the small home special are the ceiling heights in certain rooms. While it may have been an obvious move to vault the third-floor ceilings, the two-story living room is much more surprising. The open space en-ergizes the living area, helps to fill it with light, and makes the 1650-sq.-ft. home feel much larger than it is. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
6. Make some spaces feel small:
If you have ever been to a Frank Lloyd Wright house, you probably understand the concept of compression and release. Wright often made hallways tight to make the room at the end of the hall feel much more spacious when you enter. It’s a great way to make certain spaces in small homes feel more comfortable. In this way, tall ceilings are used sparingly in this home, and some of the smaller spaces are designed to feel particularly tight. Though the standard ceiling height in the house is 8 ft., the ceiling in the kitchen is dropped to 7 ft. The bathroom ceiling is purposefully painted black to create a feeling of tight quarters so that the adjacent spaces feel more open. The architect also played with ceiling heights at the front of the house. The step from the second-floor hall into the office means that the private office ceiling is a bit lower than other spaces, but this allows the public dining room below, where the homeowners will entertain guests, to have a taller ceiling. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
7. Include outdoor spaces:
To build a spec house of marketable size, the architect had to build on nearly all of the lot. But he didn’t ask for a variance for the backyard setback, because he knew that an outdoor space, however compact, would be desirable to the future homeowners. To define but not confine the outdoor space, there is a pervious CMU fence around the area. The flat roof at the front of the house is also designed and engineered to be a rooftop deck. To save money, the architect did not finish the deck, though it is ready to be finished by the homeowners and will someday create an additional outdoor space for the small home. -
8 Ways to Make Small and Skinny Feel Special
8. Minimize circulation:
Though the first floor has no space wasted on hallways, the second and third floors, which are primarily bedrooms and office space, did require some circulation routes. The most efficient design was to push the halls over to one side of the house and to put the bedrooms and office at the ends where they could take up the full width of the house. Also worth noting in the floor plans is that the architect chose to omit some common spec-house features like the master suite and walk-in closets, as they just take up too much space to be worthwhile in this small and skinny house.
View Comments
I suppose the phrase 'small house' is relative, but come on, 1650 square feet on three floors no less? Also, from what you can see of the surrounding neighboring homes, this house doesn't make any kind of effort to fit in.
It's Beautiful!
It's fantastic!
Great!
Clever and beautiful.
But why is there no range hood?