Style with Substance
big ideas for a tight site
If you’re building on a challenging lot, set your priorities to maximize its assets and offset its shortcomings through careful planning.
This Jemez Springs home by builder Mark Feldman made the most of a cliffside site by keeping a minimal footprint, adapting to the terrain, and gorging on views.
This article first appeared in Summer 2008 Su Casa
Every designer loves to build on a dream site that offers stunning views, untouched natural features, and has plenty of room to work with. It’s the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario of design, especially if the budget is big.
But in fact, the quarter-acre lot is much more common and presents far greater challenges. When you’re working with a lot the size of a postage stamp, great results just don’t come easily. So to extract every possible advantage from a tight site while shoehorning in the wish list of features, it helps to start with some old-fashioned problem solving.
The obvious first step is to prioritize your goals: are great views at the top of your list? Or privacy? What about solar gain in the winter and natural cooling in the summer? Do you want a big house, or big outdoor living areas, or both? Put all of these desires down on paper, even when it appears that some of them are contradictory, as is often the case.
The next step is to gauge your site’s potential and list its strong points—taking special note of conditions that happen to match your goals. Typical examples would be views, existing trees, good solar exposure, and gentle slope. Less obvious advantages might include easy vehicle access, availability of utilities, and good soil conditions and drainage. As the assessment becomes a little more technical, enlist the help of a builder or designer.
As a final step, note all of your site’s negative aspects—you’re bound to have a few: perhaps unsightly power lines or houses, extremely close neighbors, difficult slope, exposure to high winds, or a long and narrow lot shape. Don’t overlook visiting your site at night to rule out problems with street light glare, vehicle headlights, or obnoxious noise that you might not notice during the daytime. Study your deed and survey plat carefully for setbacks, utility easements, or restrictive covenants that could trip you up. Should you have to add your own well or septic system, be sure you have room for the required 100-foot separation. These details may be tedious and unglamorous, but attending to them skillfully may free your hands and budget for the really creative work.
Armed with all of this information, you are ready to develop a scheme that maximizes your site’s advantages while offsetting the shortcomings. It’s a sure bet that you’ll have to make some compromises, but you can almost always find a way to achieve your overall goals. For example, if you want significant solar heating but just don’t have the right exposure, you can offset that lack with extra insulation and look for other green opportunities such as roof-water catchment or gray water recycling. Study each system closely: it might be that solar exposure, though limited, provides enough direct gain for a solar hot-water system—that alone would be a huge contribution to energy savings.
If exposure to excess morning or afternoon sun poses an overheating risk, you can fend it off with shade trees or portales. Similarly, a well-placed garage can do double-duty by breaking the wind, blocking noise, and screening out unwanted views. Applying this strategy, a little trial and error will lead you to a basic plan for good site use.
As sketching evolves into a real floor plan, it’s time to explore the various tricks of the trade that make an in-town setting feel more spacious and more private than it actually is. While some of these tricks create out-and-out illusion, others are actually quite straightforward. For example, while the familiar suburban approach has been to surround the house with lawns and gardens, presenting a grand and spacious image to the street, that really doesn’t do much for the occupants. If the house is placed closer to the street instead, you can develop a larger and quite private outdoor living area on the other side of the house.
Some of the most striking homes you’ll never see are the walled hacienda compounds found everywhere in Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern towns. The adobe walls hug the edge of the street, and a passerby can’t see in unless the entry gate is left open. Instantly, an aura of mystery is created—it’s impossible to tell if the compound is large or small, empty or occupied, and the desire to peek inside is irresistible. When you gain entrance, you may find surprisingly large gardens and patios as well as the home itself, and the overall feeling is one of a secluded, private domain. An enclosed compound provides great protection from the elements, and it’s not a bad security strategy, either.
We don’t often build that way here in our car culture, and setback requirements often wouldn’t permit it anyway. But it’s certainly possible to re-create the feeling of those enclosed homes, in which nothing is obvious and much is hidden. When a home reveals itself gradually, a room at a time, you sense an illusion of endlessness. When hallways, alcoves, skylights, and multiple sight lines give the eye many places to go, you get the illusion of spaciousness. Then when a big view is featured or a beautiful garden or courtyard beckons, the illusion is complete.
Right now it’s timely to reconsider in-town and urban living. Commuter costs are rising, and large ranchette building sites are farther and farther removed from work and school. Considering high building costs and a shaky housing market, smaller resource-efficient homes look pretty attractive. With some thoughtful design and a little smoke and mirrors, there’s no reason they can’t be completely satisfying.
Vishu Magee designs homes around Santa Fe and Taos. He is the author of Archetype Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Contact him at archetype-design.com.