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, each one resolved across a client meeting, 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 client meetings

Status In design

I designed the primary suite, the kitchen, and the living–dining commons, coordinated the iterations across four client meetings, authored the construction documents for my scope, and carried the revisions through the city. The rest of the house was handled by others; the transitions where my three rooms hand off to theirs were the most carefully considered parts of my scope.

Front elevation from the permit set — The front elevation from the permit set. This is a working document, shown as one — the version of this drawing that argues for the house lives in the room studies below.

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 — a window moved nine inches because of how a particular tree sat in the view, a counter run extended so two people could work in the kitchen without crossing — and that was the plan that went into construction documents.

A window moved nine inches because of how a particular tree sat in the view. That is the resolution residential practice lives at.

Atmospheric study · in productionThe kitchen, scaled as a working room — a counter run two people can share without crossing.

Kitchen

Atmospheric study · in productionThe primary suite, sized for two people and a morning — the bed faces the window that faces the long view.

Primary suite

Atmospheric study · in productionThe living–dining commons — one open volume, scaled differently inside so the kitchen works and the living area holds.

Living–dining commons

The three rooms in my scope are being produced as atmospheric renderings to the portfolio’s shared standard; the frames above hold their place honestly rather than substituting document drawings for rooms.

The document set

I authored the full construction document set for my scope, 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.

Dimensioned floor plan sheet — The dimensioned plan — 2,503 square feet of decisions a framer can act on.

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

Braced wall plan with wind bracing schedule — The braced-wall plan, sized for a 115-mph wind speed — the quiet structural argument under the rooms.

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.