Work · One family

Virginia House

The Virginia House is the project in which the resident stops being a category and becomes a family with a name. My scope was the primary suite, the kitchen, and the living and dining commons — the rooms a family spends a day inside of. Four design iterations, refined through client meetings, taught me what residential practice actually is. You listen, you draw, you bring the drawing back, you listen again, and somewhere in the fourth round the house becomes the one this family was going to live in.

Site Churchville, Virginia

Scope Primary suite · kitchen · living–dining commons

Role Design · CD set · permitting

Iterations Four design iterations

Status In design

I was brought on to design the house, focusing on the primary suite, the kitchen, and the living–dining commons. I authored the full construction document set, including the structural braced-wall plans and the assembly details, and carried the revisions through the city's permitting.

Front elevation — two gabled wings flanking the entry, drawn in clean linework — The same face, twice: the front elevation the four iterations arrived at, and the house the family will see. The page holds still between the two readings — the drawing, and what it is for.

The same façade rendered — the two gabled wings and the entry porch under the site's old trees — The same face, twice: the front elevation the four iterations arrived at, and the house the family will see. The page holds still between the two readings — the drawing, and what it is for.

Three rooms, four iterations

The first iteration came out of a long conversation about how the family moved through a day — where they wanted the morning light, what room they would land in when they came home, how the kitchen would relate to the table they already owned and were not willing to part with. I drew the rooms loosely, returned with the drawings, and watched the clients react to them.

The second iteration was the corrections. The third was the corrections to the corrections, plus the first time the plan started to feel like a place rather than a layout. The fourth was the small adjustments — and that was the plan that went into construction documents.

Two floor plans side by side — the first plan beside the plan that left the fourth meeting — The first plan beside the plan that left the fourth meeting — the two drawings that survive, set side by side at the same scale for this page.

The kitchen — a long perimeter counter under the window, a clear-topped island with stools, walnut cabinetry, a rangetop under its hood and double wall ovens

Kitchen — the counter run and the island.

The primary suite — the bed against a papered wall, morning light through windows on two sides, warm wood floor

Primary suite — sized for two people and a morning, lit from two sides.

The document set

I authored the full construction document set, including structural braced-wall plans and high-fidelity assembly details for the envelope and the roof. A wall section that worked in studio — because the building never had to be built — failed immediately in the document set, because this building did. I learned to draw a wall the way the framer would build it, a roof the way the water would actually run off it, and a detail the way a permit reviewer would actually read it. The city’s revision cycles taught me the rest: I returned corrections and watched the gap between architectural intent and construction reality narrow until the two were the same drawing.

Floor plan with every room named and sized, walls pochéd in near-black — The plan that left the fourth meeting — every room named, sized, and settled with the family.

Foundation plan — stem walls and footings with concrete stipple — The foundation plan — the stem walls that hold the plan up, drawn in the material they are poured in.

Roof plan with hips, valleys, and slope arrows — The roof plan — three slopes resolving two gabled wings and a covered patio into one roof that drains.

Braced wall plan with panels marked as a dashed oxblood overlay — The braced-wall plan, sized for a 115-mph wind speed — the panels overlaid in oxblood, the quiet structural argument under the rooms.

Assembly detail through the pony wall — floor truss, anchor bolt, rebar — One assembly, ceiling to footing — the pony wall carrying the floor trusses down to an anchor-bolted plate.

Wall section from footing to roof — The wall section, footing to ridge — drawn the way the water runs and the framer builds.

Garage wall section from footing to roof — slab on grade, sheetrock between house and garage, anchor bolt at the sill — The same wall drawn a second time for the garage — a slab that slopes an eighth of an inch per foot instead of a truss floor, and five-eighths sheetrock where the garage meets the house.

Designing for a name

What this project gave me, more than any specific design move, was the experience of designing for one named family — of letting the plan be shaped by what they actually wanted rather than by a hypothetical resident. Every choice in the four iterations was a choice they made with me, or made me. The house is theirs in a way that no project I worked on in school ever was, and that difference is the thing I want my practice to be built around.