A very compact footprint, and a strong sense of geometry make this house a good candidate for tight sites. Views are oriented to the south and west, but you could mirror it for south and east.

This house was featured in Sarah Susanka’s book, Creating the Not So Big House (2000), in the Spring 1988 issue of House Beautiful, and the February 1986 issue of Down East magazine.

When I designed this house it was foremost in my mind to create a place that was wonderful to be in because it was small. Our clients wanted the smallest footprint possible to minimize the impact on their beautiful land. It was a vacation home for their family of four, and was designed with the idea of enlarging it (which we later did) if they moved there year round.

You enter this house on a corner porch and immediately see across the diagonal of the house to another porch. Emphasizing the diagonal in the plan tends to minimize the sense of confinement that small houses must avoid.

Since we were only cutting a small hole in the forest canopy, I took this compact footprint, and gave it a strong vertical component and a lot of roof glazing so the house could reach up toward the light, like the spruce trees around it. This assured that what sunlight fell down into this “hole in the forest” would get into the house.

On this site the house looks out to a quiet cove to the southeast, but this house would do well with any site where the approach is from a different direction than the primary view. The house can easily be mirrored to deal with a westerly as opposed to an easterly view orientation.

It is desirable in a small house that circulation space has multiple uses, so we have both a front door and an airlock mudroom entry off the front porch. This mudroom holds a freezer and washer and dryer tucked under the stairs. In the dead of winter, the same front porch and the same entry hall inside will serve both entrances—no hallways!

Once inside the building, all of the rooms radiate off the central space, which is open to the roof ridge so that you can always get a sense of the entire space, even as you are sheltered in the cozier side spaces.

Climb up the compact corner stair and the space at the top of the stairs is like a wide hallway that we developed into an office/study. Walk from there along the balcony that goes past the bathroom (or the closet space) and you end up at the bedroom. This destination effect makes the bedroom feel like a very separate and private place because of the spatial transition to get to it. Once inside the bedroom, the bay window lets all the space fly out into the view so that you can almost forget that the house is behind you.

It’s a wonderful place to hunker down near the woodstove (which could become a fireplace) and wait out the winter, and in the summer all the glass makes it like living outside.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,418

Adjusted square feet . . . . . 1,649

2 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,085 sq. ft.

View Dimension 36’

Side Dimension 33’

Height 26’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 900 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 518 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 24’ x 12’-6”

Kitchen 11’ x 13’

Bedroom–1 10’ x 13’

Bath–1 5’ x 8’-6”

Mud Room 9’ x 9’-6”

2nd Floor

Bedroom–2 9’ x 12’-6”

Bath–2 6’-6” x 11’

Study 13’-6” x 7’

Working Drawings

• Fndtn. Plan, 1st flr. Framing

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plan, Schedules

• 2nd flr./Roof Framing

• Curved wall Framing Plan

• Section “A” and Details

• Section “B” and Details

• Section “C” and Details

• Elevations

• Electrical Plans

A two-phase design that gets you living on the land in the short run, and leaves you with an elegant Greek revival cape and guesthouse in the long run. This house will do well on many sites and will fit in nicely among other houses in suburban locations, but it will make your neighbors envious.

This is a two-phase house that we developed for a couple who wanted to take advantage of their land but were not ready to commit the funds necessary to build the final house.

In doing phased houses, the critical thing to remember is to keep the transaction cost low; by that I mean the additional cost of doing it in two phases instead of all at once.

In the case of this house, we first built what would end up as the living room and screened porch, and then added a 10′x18′ “dependency” to the end that contained a tiny bedroom, small bathroom, and front porch. When we build phase two, the dependency is moved to the east and forms a downstairs bed/work room, and the living room module gets extended into a Greek revival farmhouse.

In phase one, the very small front porch of the dependency leads into a high-ceilinged space with a loft at the end. In phase two this large space will be a living room, but in the first phase, a small galley kitchen is where the fireplace will be in the phase two, and an eating area is tucked in next to it looking out the windows to the east.

In order to save money, we left all the interior finish off in phase one. In addition to saving money in phase one, when we complete things in phase two, the entire inside finish of the house will be new and things will be tied together. Also, things like changing wiring in the phase one space will be easier to accomplish.

This little house turned out to be such fun to live in that my clients extended the time before doing phase two, because until they had more time to live here, this “starter” was really all they needed.

Phase two will create a proper house, with a downstairs bed and bath (that doubles as a powder room), a full size kitchen, and a real dining area. What in phase one is the whole living area will become a nice high-ceilinged living room. Upstairs in phase two we will have a master bedroom and bath all under the slope of the roof.

On this site the long western side faces a hayfield and the eastern side is backed up to an oak forest with a rampaging stream running through it. The north side faces the river and really has the best scenic view. Since my clients loved all these views, we wanted the living room (in both phases) to look out in all three directions.

This is a house that will run along the edge of the field very comfortably, echoing the change of field to forest. These Greek revival farmhouses were almost always modest in size and very compact, and so the wide corners, broad fascia boards, and other complex trim details that echo Greek temple design change the scale of these buildings and make them very attractive to us. When large houses are done in this style, they lose the appeal that comes from this scale shift.

It’s important to note that these details and the quality of their execution can’t be cut back, or you will end up with a very humdrum version of “Developer’s Colonial,” with none of the gem-like quality of this house. The red cedar shingled roof is a gorgeous thing that changes with the light of the day and whether it is wet or dry, and though expensive is one of the things that makes this house sing. Many of the houses in this portfolio are quite comfortable with asphalt-shingled roofs and shingled sidewalls, but this house will lose a great deal if cuts are made in this area.

Finally, if you really just want to build phase one and phase two may never happen, then it would make more sense to simply continue the steep higher roof over the dependency so the house is more unified. We didn’t do it because it will be easier to detach the dependency with a low roof, and when it forms an “Ell” we wanted it to still seem dependent and to not block the view of the stream to the east from the upper floor.

If you build this house with the proper affection for the detailing and the exterior finishes, it will always be one the classiest houses in town.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses.

House Details

Heated sq. ft. . . . . 608 and 1,593

Adjusted sq. ft. . . .714 and 1,962

1 and 2 – Bedrooms

1 and 2 – Bathrooms

Full basement foundation

Dimensions, Phase 1

Foot Print 792 sq. ft.

View Dimension 18’

Side Dimension 36’

Height 20’

Summary

1st Floor 464 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 144 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living/Din. 17’ x 17’

Kitchen 10’ x 8’

Bedroom–1 9’-6” x 7’-6”

Bath–1 8’ x 6’

2nd Floor

Loft 17’ x 8’

———————————————

Dimensions, Phase 2

Foot Print 1,359 sq. ft.

View Dimension 42’

Side Dimension 50’

Height 24’

Summary

1st Floor 1,111 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 612 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living Rm. 17’ x 17’

Kit./Din. 22’ x 12’

Bedroom–1 12’ x 13’

Bath–1 8’ x 6’

Scrn Porch 18’ x 8’

Entry Porch 5’ x 12’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–2 16’ x 12’

Bath–2 5’ x 12’

Loft 17’ x 8’

The house with the strongest ties to “Bungalow” or “Craftsman” style, this is a great waterfront building. You can live on the ground floor and put the kids upstairs under the eaves and they’ll love it.

This house was featured in Christian and Christen Gladu’s book, Bungalow Plans (2002).

What we have here is a shingled cabin designed for the shores of a beautiful harbor on the Maine coast where it is important to have a house that talks the language of its 19th century neighbors.

This is probably the most cottage-like of any in the collection, and with its compact shape could probably do well on many sites. Like most of our houses the formal approach needs to be at the opposite end from the view side where the windows are. Ideally, the view is also on the south side so that you get the advantage of the sun.

Downeast cottages of the past were always very much about porches, but putting the porches on the south side made these houses very dark. So we took the south porch and filled it in with living space, but still expressed it in the roof line. This leaves just a corner of covered porch on the southeast where you can sit on a dripping day or stand out of the rain and check your boat on its mooring. Likewise the generous porch on the north is essential to really establish the entry and get the scale of the building down.

Immediately inside the entry door is an entry hall with a high ceiling and the staircase. It gives one access to the downstairs bedroom and bath or the upper two bedrooms and their bath without traipsing all through the house.

The main space of the house is a unified kitchen/dining/living space. Because I think those functions need some separation even if you want to get the benefit of a sweep of space, we set the dining area out in the front in what amounts to a bay. On the east side of the bay is a window, and on the west is a low wall that separates a small sitting area that could either be built-in seats or a small office. The “living room” is a furniture grouping gathered around the fireplace and is focused on it. A lot of the action in a summer house (and in fact in most houses) really happens around the dining room table, so why not put it in the view and let the living room look over it to get a view.

The big deck that makes up the foreground of this plan is really dictated somewhat by the site. On ours it grounds this house to a rock ledge that slopes steeply down to the harbor, but your site might dictate something very different.

The upstairs of this house has two nice bedrooms under the eaves of the roof, each with a window seat for views and daydreaming. The east bedroom doesn’t have a closet because I thought something like an armoire would work better there.

There is a hidden storage area under the eaves, a bit low but useful, that is accessed from the back of the west bedroom closet. Even if you don’t use it, your grandchildren will love it.

Both rooms have a sink in them, because our client remembers them in the cottage that he grew up in on this site. We leave them in for you because it seems like a pretty civilized idea for what I think is a very civilized house.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,539

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . 1,793

3 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Crawl space foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,708 sq. ft.

View Dimension 28’

Side Dimension 42’

Height 21’

Summary

1st Floor 924 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 615 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living/Din. 18’ x 20’

Kitchen 8’ x 16’

Bedroom–1 10’ x 12’

Bath–1 7’ x 5’

Entry 6’ x 12’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–2 13’ x 14’

Bedroom–3 13’ x 14’

Bath–2 8’ x 8’-6”

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• Elevations

• Sections, Schedules

• Fndtn. Plan, 1st flr. Framing

• 2nd flr./Roof Framing

• Details

• Perspectives

• Electrical Plans

This is the only house created especially for this collection. It comes in five variations that range from super-compact to small. Like the VW Bug, we think this design will have a long life.

“Cabin–1″ happened as a result of two demands sort of colliding in our office.

Ever since we published “Lucia’s Little Houses” we have had a number of requests for something smaller than our smallest house. However, it usually takes a specific site to really get me thinking about a house, and in this case it was the east side of Alice’s Field where our friends are planning to build.

I wanted to show them something smaller than anything we had been talking about. “Cabin-1″ and its siblings were the outgrowth of that mix.

I was looking for a small building that did not become so obsessed with efficiency that it lost its presence. Smaller buildings can capture your imagination because they can be held in the imagination more completely—but there has to be enough visual and spatial interest to make it worth your imagination’s while.

In Cabin-1, I was looking for as small a building as possible that would still have

• a decent kitchen and bath.

• an entry porch to pause on arrival.

• a screened porch for an outdoor living room. • a fireplace (or stove) at its core.

• a definable place to eat.

• sleeping lofts over the smaller spaces.

• open plan so you can sense the entire space. • enough modularity that parts can move and

still be logical.

This building has 636 square feet of heated floor space, and 850 adjusted square feet. We figure it can be built for under $100,000, depending on finish and site utility costs, perhaps substantially under.

Cabin-2 adds a couple of 2 ́-6 ̋ “bumpouts” —cantilevered extensions to the kitchen and/or dining area. The kitchen “bumpout” moves it from a super compact kitchen to one that is just compact and efficient. The dining room “bumpout”gives the dining area both more space, and better definition as a space. The possibility of skylighting both these ex- tensions adds another dimension of interest and can add markedly to the sense of place and space in both these rooms. These add 23 square feet to the kitchen and 30 square feet to the dining room. So Cabin-2 ends up with 688.5 heated square feet and 903 adjusted square feet. These extensions can also be added to Cabin-3 or Cabin-4.

Cabin-3 consumes part of the screened porch with a “TV Nook” as an alcove off the living room. That alcove could be a space for a small office, a sleeping area with a futon that gets turned back into seating during the day or whatever your imagination conjures up. Another change shown in Cabin-3 is the substitution of an inglenook to the west of the fireplace to provide a better seating situation. This precludes circulation around the central chimney, and the loss of some storage and the “ship’s” ladder to the loft becomes a vertical ladder—but I think the potential seating in the living area is greatly enhanced. This option is available in all the Cabin designs.

Cabin-4 consumes another part of the screened porch with a downstairs bedroom. I also introduce an alternate bathroom layout in this plan (that could be used in any of the plans) that moves the door to the south, thereby shortening the circulation path, giving a space for a unit heater, but losing some potential storage.

Cabin-5 simply combines all the options of the previous 4 designs into one loaded model. Yet even this building has a very modest 849 square feet of heated floor space and 1,012 adjusted square feet.

Because of the symmetry of the design it can easily be mirrored left to right, the dormer can be put on the north side, skylights can be added etc.

You should be able to play with these permutations and come up with a compact little house that will adapt to your site, still keep its original presence and feel like home.

“The Cabin does not have a site plan because—having been designed specifically for this portfolio—it was not built for any specific client or designed to fit any particular site. The design is flexible in terms of site orientation, though we recommend that the entry face South and East and the screen porches face West, as in the plan drawings.”

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . 636 to 849

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . .850 to 1,012

2 and 3 – Bedrooms

1 – Bathroom

Slab or full basement

foundation

Dimensions, Cabin 1

Foot Print 640 sq. ft.

View Dimension 32’

Side Dimension 20’

Height 19’

Summary

1st Floor 436 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 200 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 10’ x 15’

Dining 6’-6” x 15’

Kitchen 8’ x 8’

Bath–1 5’ x 8’

Scrn. Porch 8’ x 20’

2nd Floor

Loft–1 8’ x 9’

Loft–2 8’ x 11’-6”

Dimensions, Cabin 5

Foot Print 698 sq. ft.

View Dimension 32’

Side Dimension 23’

Height 19’

Summary

1st Floor 649 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 200 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 10’ x 15’

Dining 9’ x 13’

Kitchen 8’ x 10’

Bath–1 5’ x 8’

Bedroom–1 9’-6” x 9’-6”

TV Nook 8’x 9’

2nd Floor

Loft–1 8’ x 9’

Loft–2 8’ x 11’-6”

Working Drawings

• Schedules, Notes

• 1–Plans, Elevations

• 1–Sections, Framing

• 2–Plans, Elevations

• 2–Sections, Framing

• 3–Plans, Elevations

• 3–Sections, Framing

• 4–Plans, Elevations

4–Sections, Framing 5–Plans, Elevations 5–Sections, Framing

• Details, Foundation

• Details, Roof & Walls

• Framing, Alt Foundation

A very compact footprint and small cozy spaces make this a very versatile house. This is our house, and we designed it so that we would always be near an outside wall and the view. It will work well in fields or woods and can deal with a variety of view potentials.

This house was featured in Fine Homebuilding magazine’s book, More Small Houses (1998) as well as in the May 2002 issue of Yankee magazine, the May 1999 issue of Maine Boats & Harbors magazine, and the Summer 1997 issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine.

This little shingled house that sits on a peninsula in the Bagaduce River at the end of a long hay field is, more so than any other in this collection, an experiment.

It is the house Lucia and I built for ourselves, and it is an experiment about fitting a house to your life like a glove. We spend a lot of time in the summer on an old wooden sailboat that has very tight accommodations, and we love it. We love the cozy, at-home feel that we get when we are settled in down below on our boat with the tiny wood stove and paraffin lamps. So when we decided to build a new house we thought about what we could do to create the same feelings in a house, but still have it be light and airy, efficient and connected to this wonderful piece of land.

The first thing that we realized was that we could do without the traditional living room. When we are in the living room we sit around and talk, listen to music, read and watch TV. All this could be accomplished with about a 10′ x 11 ́ niche with a built-in seat. If this niche projected into the view and had glass on all sides it would be all we needed. Our kitchen needed to be bigger because we tend to get at cross purposes with each other when we are both cooking and so we needed two distinct work areas.

Our bedroom is upstairs, and Lucia insisted on it being big enough for a comfy reading chair so that it can serve as an alternate living space if one of us wants to get away and be private.

There’s also a wonderful bathroom on the south that is big enough to have a sort of greeenhouse for soaking up the sun and long showers in the winter. Taking a shower in the jungle!

The rest of the second floor is a nice sunny landing at the top of the the stairs and big walk-in dressing room with all our storage on shelves, hanging or in drawers, but not behind a lot of expensive doors.

Jesse’s bedroom (which is probably ours someday) is downstairs and is on a prime sunny southeast corner, because most of the time it will be another dayroom/office type space when he’s not here and we don’t have guests.

That pretty much set the sizes of the rooms, and the shapes and orientations were determined by the land, views and outside forces like the sun.

Because the house sits alone at the end of Alice’s Field with a backdrop of big oak trees along the river bank, it needed a certain sense of internal order—to be able to stand on its own as an object as well as deal with the dynamics of our program and the site. We also wanted it to look OK in the fabric of other houses along this stretch of the river.

Searching for this personality was an evolutionary process where Lucia’s decisive input was critical. I would mutter myself into a compromise of these forces, she would look at it and simply not approve it — Keep working. Then when it really did start working together, she knew it and gave it her stamp of approval. Good architecture does not come without that kind of decisive input. That final form turned out to be three gable roofed forms that slide together, but also seem to be pulling at right angles to each other—pulled apart by the dynamics of the site but being held together by the centripetal force of the order. But it mostly looks like a regular house and we’re crazy about it.

Seven years later in 2003, the only thing I would change is to lower the living room window sills by 4–6 inches. Do we some- times wish it was bigger? Sure. Does it need to be? Nope.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,284

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . 1,427

2 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,208 sq. ft.

View Dimension 42’

Side Dimension 28’

Height 21’

Summary

1st Floor 838 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 456 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 12’ x 16’

Dining 16’ x 12’

Kitchen 12’ x 12’

Bedroom–2 14’ x 11’

Bath–1 7’ x 6’

Scr. Porch 16’ x 10’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 12’ x 15’

Bath–2 12’ x 6’

Dressing 10’ x 12’

Working Drawings

• Foundation Plan, Framing

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plan

• Elevations, Schedules

• Sections/Details

• 1st flr. Interior Elevations

• 2nd flr. Interior Elevations

• Mechanical, Electrical Plans

A good hillside house where the hill slopes toward the view. Two nice sized bedrooms are sheltered under the steep roofs and the living room has a great high sloping ceiling. This house works best surrounded by tall trees, or backed up to a reasonably steep hillside, and its walkout basement can take advantage of a good slope.

Another cottage on the shore, but this one is designed for a forested site with more of a vertical component than the other Cottage in the portfolio. Our clients had a heavily forested rocky site with an opening to the south and great views to the west and northwest. A short way up the hill was a little glade with some old apple trees, a sure sign that a house had been here before. It felt right for a compact house like this one.

We were looking for a house that would feel very solid and simple, but would have a few surprises inside. Because there were lots of trees in the immediate view we wanted a feeling of individual windows to maintain the wall integrity of the house. We weren’t after sweeping views because they were not there.

Approaching from the east you see a simple cape with a dormer on the back side that is over the stairs. A little entry porch is cut out of the volume to draw you in (and keep you dry while you find your keys). You enter into a small foyer with the back wall of the fireplace in front of you and the woodstove close at hand. On the right is a little alcove we call a library, a place to keep a small desk and computer, or answer the phone, really just a niche off the staircase which sort of wraps into it.

As you wander to the west—drawn by the windows and the sense of more space—you come into the two story space that lets you look up to the balcony upstairs, and realize that there is another gable on the west side of the house. Both can be seen from inside this surprisingly big space.

Just under the balcony is a dining area with access to a screened porch and a very efficient U-shaped kitchen beyond it. Since we wanted this kitchen to have a view to the north and west, and look south into the dining and living space, we put most of what would normally be overhead storage into a pantry across the hall. This is often a good strategy to open up a kitchen and to keep cabinet costs down.

Upstairs are two bedrooms and a bath. All the rooms are under the eaves of the 45° roofs, but they all have part of the gable ends to look out of as well. There is a generous balcony that looks over the living room that can be used as an overflow sleeping space, alternate living room, or kids’ play area. Or you could enclose it and get a much bigger primary bedroom, or a third closed off room, paying the price of the house feeling much less spacious. Of course, if space is tight the entire two story space can be floored in at a later date, but I bet you never do it.

I did design this house with a forest surround in mind, but looking at the drawings I think it would do well in an open site because of its strong cohesive form.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,540

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . 1,818

2 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,102 sq. ft.

View Dimension 38’

Side Dimension 29’

Height 24’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 844 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 696 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 16’ x 12’

Dining 10’ x 12’

Kitchen 12’ x 11’

Bath–1 12’ x 15’

Library 7’ x 6’

Entry 11’ x 8’

Scrn. Porch 21’ x 9’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 12’ x 13’

Bedroom–2 16’ x 10’

Bath–2 12’ x 8’

Balcony 9’ x 14’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• Elevations

• Sections

• Details

• Details

• Details

• Int. Elev. Kitchen, Schedules

• Fndtn. Plan, 1st flr. Framing

• 2nd flr./Roof Framing

• Electrical Plans

A good choice for a house on the edge of a forest or in a forest, where tall trees will be its companion. Lots of interior drama with an open three story space with balconies slung across up high.

This house was driven by two clear imperatives that dovetailed nicely.

The first was my clients’ desire for an open plan house with a great feeling of connectedness — we could do this in a no-holds-barred manner because kids were not part of the picture.

Secondly, although they had a good deal of land, there was one place that grabbed ahold of me. It was a very tight spot in between ledge outcrops. If the house could keep a very compact footprint, we could fit it into this spot and get up a bit above the trees and look out to the ocean.

The exterior has very clear angular forms that remind me a bit of industrial buildings in New England from 100 years ago. The interior is very sparse and taut, and is essentially one three story space with a second and third floor hanging in the space almost as balconies.

Coming in the southeast corner, you pass through a small mudroom area and come out under the ceiling of the second floor. On your left is an entire three story open space with a very open stair winding up in it. This tall space allowed us to use a lot of south facing glass so that we could get a great deal of solar gain (and good old sunlight) in the long Maine winters.

The kitchen is under this ceiling, but the living room and dining areas are out in the tall spaces. I didn’t want the inhabitants to feel overwhelmed by the height of the spaces, so we created small bump-outs and alcoves that are under lower ceilings. There one can feel protected by the house even though there is this great space all around you.

On the northwest corner is a small screened porch that is like an island on the deck that wraps around the north end. It serves as a subtle barrier to the more private deck on the west where the hot tub nestles in next to the rocks. Here on this deck one is sheltered from the west by the ledge outcrops. Rising above deck level, this enhances the sense that the house is planted into this rock.

The primary bedroom is on the second floor and is open to the west, where it has its own little second floor deck. This deck is just over the ledge outcrops.

There is also a dressing area and bathroom (which are walled off) on this floor. You can continue on to the top floor, which we thought of as a kind of swing space—maybe an office or a guest room or an alternative living room. My clients liked it so much that guests and office moved out to a studio above the garage and they keep the tower room and its deck as a place to go and hang out with a view.

This house would want a site with an approach opposite the view and some tall elements around it. Because it is narrow and tall, it is specially suitable for the edges of places.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

Details

Heated sq. ft. . . . . . 1,484

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . .1,855

2 – Bedrooms

11⁄2 – Bathrooms

Crawl space foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,460 sq. ft.

View Dimension 43’

Side Dimension 33’

Height 35’

Summary

1st Floor 850 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 465 sq. ft.

3rd Floor 169 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 15’ x 18’

Dining 9’ x 14’

Kitchen 12’ x 14’

Bath–1 4’-6” x 5’-6”

Laundry 8’-6” x 5’-6”

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 12’ x 12’

Bath–2 17’ x 5’-6”

3rd Floor

Loft 12’ x 12’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• 3rd flr. Plan, Schedules

• Window Schedule

• Elevations

• Elevations

• Sections

• Details

• Details

• Details

• Guest/Garage Plan

• Electrical Plan, 1st flr.

• Electrical Plan, 2nd flr.

• Fndtn Plan, Framing

• 2nd & 3rd flr. Framing

• Roof Plan/Framing

A renovation of an 18th century cape, we have redrawn this New England farmhouse for modern building techniques. It retains the cozy spaces of the original, but adds a lot more sunlight and breathing space. It will work well in the country and would be especially happy in a New England coastal town.

This house was featured in the February 1994 issue of Down East magazine, the Fall/Winter 1994/95 issue of Good Housekeeping, the November 1994 issue of Harrowsmith, the February 1997 issue of Remodeling, as well as in other publications.

This was our house. It was built in the 1790’s by George Morse. In 1990 we totally renovated it. Lucia, our son Jesse, and I (and earlier, our two older boys) were sheltered by this wonderful house since 1976. Of course, in time honored Maine tradition, it is still locally known as the Charlie Cotton house after the man who lived in it with his family early in the 20th century.

We include it in this collection because it is a house that will do well in a more village-like context. Being mostly from the 18th century, it is a house about walls more than windows, and as such does well with closer neighbors than many of our houses designed for remote sites with long views.

Just inside the entry door is a small kitchen which works great for one cook, but is rather crowded for two. It has a kitchen wood cookstove to supplement the gas range, because we like both, but you could add more counter.

As one moves off to the left the house opens up into a two story space that we created by removing one of the four bedrooms upstairs (see back cover photo). This eating space is filled with sun all day in the winter, but in the summer big maples to the southwest give us shade in the afternoon. As the sun gets lower in the west it streams under the limbs of the maple trees that line the town road, pouring through the small paned windows and drawing us into the living room for the end of the day.

Off the living room is a small alternate living room that I call a library, a good place for solving the reading versus TV struggle.

Upstairs are three bedrooms under the eaves with large roof windows that open for cross ventilation and give wonderful views of the stars. The master bedroom has an extra deep closet (to fit the stairwell width) and we used that depth to put shelves in the back.

The little hall upstairs looks into the two story space and shares its light and the warm air that floats up from the woodstove below. We put in a thermostatically controlled fan that comes on when it gets too warm, blowing the warm air down through a duct into the library. Except when we are lazy and don’t keep it going, our Vermont Castings Vigilant woodstove easily heats this house.

If you live in a cold climate, the entry side of this house really ought to face south, but it would not look silly if it didn’t. And you might think of a sloped arbor over the deck for summer sun control if you don’t have the maples.

If we didn’t have an opportunity to build a new house in Alice’s Field we would have happily spent the rest of our lives here, and then maybe it would become the Knight house, but probably not.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,705

Adjusted sq. ft.: 1,887

3 – Bedrooms

1 1⁄2 – Bathrooms

Full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print: 1,489 sq. ft.

View Dimension: 39’

Side Dimension: ’56

Height: 23′-6″

Summary

1st Floor: 978 sq. ft.

2nd Floor: 727 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 17’ x 13’

Dining 10’ x 13’

Kitchen 16’ x 10’

Den 12’ x 10’

Bath–1 8’ x 7’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 12’ x 17’

Bedroom–2 11’-6” x 13’

Bedroom–3 10’-6”x12’-6”

Bath–2 6’ x 8’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• Elevations

• Sections

• 1st & 2nd flr. Framing

• Interior Elev./Cabinetry

• Interior Elev./Cabinetry

• Millwork

• Electrical Plans

• Details, Schedules

A good choice for a field or hillside with strong solar possibilities. This is a great house to spend the whole day in and watch the sun move through your life. This is essentially a one-story house (which will work without a basement) with a bonus space upstairs that makes an excellent workspace.

This is a house whose forms grew out of an interaction of three primary forces. The first was my clients’ desire to have a house with rooms that reflected the way they spend their day. Largely they work as writers and do the survival kinds of things that make living on a Maine island interesting, like baking bread and loading the wood stove.

The second force was the very long and harsh Maine winter. This island site is a somewhat exposed field that faces south with long water views to the east and southwest, and we needed a house that would grab as much sun as there is to get and fill those work spaces with it. I needed the house to spread out, grab hold of the ground and hunker down in the winter wind, but also exploit a great view from the second floor.

The third force was our desire to design a house that would be a comfortable neighbor to the very modest and friendly frame houses that are in this area. We strung the daytime places out in a sawtooth pattern along the southern view. You get up in the morning at the east end with the sun, and move through the kitchen to the dining room.

The end of the day finds you at the west side of the house on the screened porch. Decks facing south and east are tucked in the shelter of these saw’s teeth. As usual in this climate, I favored an east and south exposure over west and south (but you could flip the plan east to west).

Originally what is now the living room was to be the work space, but my clients agreed that the view was so good from the second floor that they would put up with the stairs in order to be tucked up there under the roof with the view. Once up there we had to add a little crow’s nest to get outside to clap the binoculars onto passing lobster boats.

We sneaked in a guest room and bath off and away at the west side, very much out of the flow of the traffic and working lives of this couple.

The one-car garage, while not a necessity, is mighty nice around here in the winter. It shares the entry space with the front door, and turns the house’s back on the cold northerly wind.

This house is on a slab because it was a damp site and we wanted the thermal mass of the slab to be able to soak up the sun’s heat. You could add a basement and put a stair under the one that now goes to the second floor. While I’ve never really seen a house with this shape, it has a nice “American” familiarity to me. Perhaps it reminds me some of the architecture where I grew up in the southern part of New Jersey.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,846

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . 2,204

2 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Office

Slab or full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 2,416 sq. ft.

View Dimension 56’

Side Dimension 60’

Height 23’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 1,560 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 286 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 20’ x 20’

Dining 6’ x 8’

Kitchen 17’ x 11’

Bedroom–1 16’ x 10’

Bedroom–2 11’ x 12’

Bath–1 8’ x 10’

Bath–2 6’-6” x 6’-6”

Dressing 8’ x 10’

Scr. Porch 8’ x 12’

Garage 24’ x 16’

2nd Floor

Study 16’ x 18’

Working Drawings

• Foundation Plan

• 1st flr. Plan

• 2nd flr. Plan

• Elevations, Wind. Sched.

• Elevations, Door Sched.

• Sections

• Sections/Details

• 1st flr. Framing

• 2nd flr. Framing

• Electrical Plan, 1st flr.

• Electrical Plan, 2nd for

One of our smallest houses, and great for a single person or a couple. Its views are strongly oriented in one direction and it makes a great house for the waterfront. Although you can put it over a basement, you don’t have to have one.

This house was really designed for a single person, though it would do fine for a couple. It’s one of the smallest houses in the collection and makes a decision that it’s OK to have a house with only one bedroom. The payback for that decision is really quite a bit of elbow room in a house that is just under 1000 square feet. Its form, and especially the image of the French door up in the gable, reminds me of a little cabin I imprinted on in Big Sur. It could be the house Hansel and Gretel found in the woods, without the witch.

It was designed to sit on a gentle slope that slides down towards the water to the south. You enter a nice little roofed porch, come into an actual airlock entry with a closet under the stairs, and then come into the main living area of the house. Windows stretch across in front of you with a big bench under them (15 ́of bench will sleep two guests in sleeping bags quite nicely, if you make the bench 2′-6 ̋ deep).

The chimney with woodstove forms a demarcation point to separate the eating area from the living room. A small fireplace could be here, but it gets a bit bulky and in a small house simple is better than complex and compact is better than bulky. A medium woodstove will easily heat this entire house.

There is a nice one-person-at-a-time kitchen with most of the storage in a pantry next to the refrigerator. Beyond that is a small utility area for the hot water heater and assorted junk. If you put central heat in this house, it probably goes down below in a basement, or the utility area bumps out a few feet and it goes in there.

Stairs take you up to a long hall with a very big closet (10 ́of hanging space) with deep shelves behind the hanging clothes. Moving through the door you come into a 12 ́x16 ́ bedroom with skylights and a little Romeo and Juliet balcony. If you decide you have to have a bathroom upstairs, we could do away with the light well next to the stairs and capture the storage space with the addition of some sky-lighting. That is a variant that we will show in the working drawings. But really, isn’t one bathroom enough?

In fact, a case can be made for dormers in the bedroom and bigger decks and bigger screened porches and bigger… and soon the clarity of this small house is gone and everything would need to be rethought, including your mortgage.

Why the arbor over the deck? I like it because it makes the deck feel more sheltered but doesn’t block the sun in the winter. In the summer you can grow leafy vines on it and get as much shade as you might need. In Maine, that’s not much.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,020

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . 1,148

1 – Bedroom

1 – Bathroom

Full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,088 sq. ft.

View Dimension 32’

Side Dimension 34’

Height 22’

Summary

1st Floor 676 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 344 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 13’-6” x 13’

Dining 10’ x 11’

Kitchen 9’ x 13’

Bath–1 7’ x 8’

Scr. Porch 6’ x 14’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 17’ x 13’-6”

Storage 4’ x 11’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plan

• Flr. Plan w/2nd flr bath

• Elevations

• Sections, Schedules

• Fndtn. Plan, Details

• 1st & 2nd flr. Framing

• Details

• 1st & 2nd flr. Electrical Plans

One of the smallest houses in the collection, it’s a good choice for sites that will respond well to delicate proportions and small scale. Being small, but somewhat rambling, all the rooms have good views in two opposite directions. Will work without a basement.

This is a wonderful little Victorian summer cottage suitable for hanging about in an old cotton sweater and forgetting what you should be doing to better the world.

We designed it for a very small piece of property but this house will do fine anyplace where its delicate scale won’t get beaten up by large ugly things nearby.

This house is built around the discipline of a 12 ́ width. In places where that is just not wide enough, I have added bays that both create more visual space and add on functions of window seats, so less furniture is required. By fastening what Charles Moore referred to as “saddlebags” to the side of a smaller module, we aren’t tempted into an ever bigger house.

Beyond the living room is the small screened porch in which to sit and watch the sunset sans bugs. While easy access is necessary in order to make the deck an integral part of the action, I like to put doors in unfurnishable space. So the living room accesses the deck via a door alongside the dining room table where you can’t put furniture anyway, and via a single door that swings into the screened porch. This also serves to make the small living room seem less of a traffic corridor.

In the heart of the house, a pivot point is a small corner fireplace in the living room. A kitchen woodstove (or any woodstove) can back up to the brick backwall of the chimney. The fireplace is to feel good around, and the stove will really heat the place.

The 8 ́x12 ́ kitchen sticks a counter out into a bay, so the dishwasher can see the water, which is to the west. The dining room is big enough at 10 ́x11 ́ for a 3 ́x6 ́ table—and we give it a bit more breathing room with a bay window into which a seat can be built.

Two bedrooms and a bathroom share the up- stairs. Since this is the only bathroom in the house, it is divided into two compartments, with the tub and sink being most remote so that somebody can take a long bath without junior beating on the door demanding entry to use the toilet. The north bedroom has access to a roof deck over the screened porch to make an adult refuge.

All of the bay windows carry through to the second floor in order to emphasize the vertical component of this house, which very consciously echoes the carpenter gothic of the 19th century. I think this house will do well in subtle places where the delicacy of its form will not be overlooked.

One significant design feature with this house is that there is only an 8 ́ floor to floor height—normally it would be 9 ́. Since this house was to be left “unfinished” inside, we exposed the second floor joists, but the bottom of those joists are about 7 ́-4 ̋ high. I feel this gives the proper scale to these rooms, making the horizontal dimensions seem a bit bigger. Likewise the upstairs is very much under the eaves, with roofs springing from a 4 ́ high plate. Although you could get away with making this house taller, it would lose something in the translation.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,183

Adjusted square feet . . . . . 1,364

2 – Bedrooms

1 – Bathroom

Crawl space foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,006 sq. ft.

View Dimension 39’

Side Dimension 37’

Height 19’

Summary

1st Floor 640 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 543 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 11’ x 15’-6”

Dining 10’ x 11’

Kitchen 11’ x 10’

Entry 6’ x 4’

Scr. Porch 12’ x 8’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 11’ x 12’-6”

Bedroom–2 12’ -6”x 11’

Bath–1 6’ x 8’

Working Drawings

• Cover Sheet, Schedules

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• Elevations

• Sections

• 1st & 2nd flr. Framing

• Electric Plans

A good choice for a house on the edge of a forest or in a forest, where tall trees will be its companion. Lots of interior drama with an open three story space with balconies slung across up high.

We designed this house for a wonderful Yankee lady who wanted a no-nonsense house to move into after years of living in a wonderful but bothersome Victorian house nearby.

Our client wanted to be able to have some live-in help at some time in the future – hence the small second bedroom downstairs, and useful as a study in the near term. Also, doors to the bath and bedroom are big enough for handicapped access.

There are two bedrooms and a bath upstairs, but on a tight budget a door can be put at the bottom of the stairs and the entire second floor left as an unfinished attic. Our client wanted a house where she could live comfortably and modestly on one floor, but have space for grandchildren upstairs. That fit in with my notions that in New England most single story buildings with simple plans are not very convincing.

This house was situated on a slight hill that looked south over the main road to the water a long way off. All of her living space was on the south side, centering around a kind of greenhouse-bay that extends the living space and gives this little house a surprising sense of space inside. It also helps this house to be very easy to heat.

You approach this house by driving around to the back—if you are the owner you drive right into your garage and enter through the kitchen. Everybody else comes in under a small porch, through a small airlock entry with an inner door of glass so it doesn’t feel like a cell. Farther inside is a sort of buffer zone created by stairs on the left, an alcove on the right leading to the first floor bedrooms and bath, and some built-in bookcases in front and to the left. This buffer space is visually part of the living space, but defined enough that the living room is still a visually distinct destination.

The living room is filled with sun all day long in the winter. Under part of the glazed roof is a long window seat (or it could be a plant bench) and down in the southeastern corner is an eating area that can get much bigger with guests.

There is a woodstove (no energy-eating fireplace for this lady!) and chimney as a sort of pivot point. A very efficient galley kitchen with lots of storage and a laundry beyond is on your way back to the garage.

If you wanted a more open plan, you could delete the bookcase peninsula and make the west wall of the kitchen a low wall to open everything up. Our client didn’t want to do this because she was of a generation that liked a more separate kitchen, and of course you give up a lot of storage.

In working on this house for Lucia’s Little Houses I was constantly tempted to update this plan and make it more open. I didn’t because then it would have lost the wonderful frugality and practicality that its original client demanded. Be careful changing this one.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,477

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . .1,689

4 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Full basement foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,539 sq. ft.

View Dimension 45’

Side Dimension 44’

Height 22’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 947 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 530 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 13’ x 15’

Dining 8’ x 10’

Kitchen 8’ x 10’

Bedroom–1 10’ x 11’

Bedroom–2 12’ x 8’

Bath–1 8’ x 5’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–3 11’ x 12’

Bedroom–4 11’ x 12’

Bath–2 8’ x 7’

Working Drawings

• Fndtn. & 1st flr. Plans

• 1st & 2nd flr. Framing Plans

• 2nd flr. & Roof Plans

• Roof Framing Plan

• Section “A” / Details

• Section “B” / Details

• Elevations

• Int. Elevations, Schedules

• Electrical Plans

A romantic and casual design for weekend retreats or year ’round living for a small family looking for a compact house with charm. This house can even stretch a bit to better suit your needs.

Sometimes we design two houses of different sizes for our clients. We often want to keep the size down on the main house so it remains a reasonable size for a few people — a standard requirement with “empty nesters.” Because of this, we design a number of smaller guesthouses for the times when visitors come to stay awhile.

We are especially pleased with this two-bedroom guesthouse that was designed to go with a shingled cottage down on the shore. As it is a guesthouse, it has a very limited kitchen. You could expand the kitchen a bit and have a perfectly reasonable two bedroom, one and a half bath house at a little over 1,250 adjusted square feet. The plan is, for the most part, symmetrical, so you could easily flip the plan and place the living room on the west side.

There are two entrance doors, one at the porch and one on the side. The side door is handy to the kitchen and a small coat closet. A small porch roof shelters this door which is next to the parking area. In this version, the door is on the west but reversing the plan will put it on the east side, away from winter winds, if necessary. The porch entry is most useful in the summertime when you’ll want to relax on the porch and enjoy the view. As you can see on the site plan, the view is down the hill, so the porch and most of the rooms have the prime view.

The ground floor bath has a half bath and laundry, with a stacking washer and dryer. The dining and living spaces are open, al- lowing some flexibility in the furniture arrangements. The living area has a fireplace at the end. Window seats flank the raised hearth and give you a cozy spot to read or relax by the fire. The kitchen is small. It can be arranged to provide a bit more workspace though. You could also stretch that part of the house a bit and give yourself some more space for the kitchen and the bathrooms as well. The open stairway brings in extra light and adds to the spacious feeling.

The original design is on a concrete slab. You could also build over a crawl space or a basement. If you have a basement, you can have a basement stair and enter it from the kitchen. And with basements we often put in an outside stair for moving bulky items into and out of it.

The second floor has two identical bedrooms and a shared full bath. The bedrooms each have a bed and a sitting space next to large windows. In the original design these are the best seats in the house! You could set aside one bedroom for kids with two single beds built into the corners. The ceilings slope down to chest-high walls and give the rooms added visual interest. Large windows on two walls give you a great view and lots of light. And note the small window near the floor in the corner where you can curl up on a cushion under the low roof.

This design can work well on a sloping or level site. If there is a slope, then the porch should face downhill and the best view should be downhill.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,224

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . . . .1,272

2 – Bedrooms

1 1⁄2 – Bathrooms

Slab foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 752 sq. ft.

View Dimension 29’-4″

Side Dimension 28’

Height 23’-8”

Summary

1st Floor 552 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 672 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living/Din 28’ x 14’

Kitchen 10’ x 8’

Bath–1 6’ x 8’

Porch 6’ x 20’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 14’ x 20’

Bedroom–2 14’ x 20’

Bath–2 9’ x 8’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans, Schedules

• Elevations

• Sections

• Details

• Structural Plans

• Electrical Plan

For people who want traditional lines and a flexible interior, plenty of sunlight and an open feeling inside. This house is a good choice for a small family or a couple who want extra space for guests.

This house is based on one of the typical farmhouses common in our part of Maine. These were built in the late 1800’s, and they’re one of our favorite house styles.

This version has been updated to meet current living patterns but it still follows the traditional series of spaces, namely the big house, little house, and barn. In this case the barn is an oversized single-car garage. This house should be located with the entry porch facing in a southerly direction. We wanted a light-filled and spacious feeling house in an understated, traditional, and efficient form. This house will fit well in a variety of settings; on the edge of a field with trees in the rear, in a clearing in the woods, or even in town on a quiet neighborhood street.

The “little house” contains the entry area and stairway plus a utility room and a full bath. You can enter the house from the front porch or from the garage through this space. The front porch is long and deep enough to sit down on a nice summer day, or evening, to enjoy the view or chat with the neighbors.

The “big house” flows directly from the entry hall. As you leave the entry hall to your right is the kitchen, efficiently sized for one or two people. The kitchen has a large pantry cabinet and the high ceilings allow for extra storage above the cabinets. From the kitchen you have a view toward the driveway and the back yard. It’s close to the living and dining areas, truly the functional center of the house.

The dining room has a two-story ceiling with sunlight coming in from high windows and a skylight. It is really the visual center of the house, with an overlook from the second floor hall. The living room is open to the dining room and shares the sunlight from that room. It’s designed to be a relaxing place to sit and talk and watch the fire. Completing the ground floor is a retreat in the far corner.

This is a quiet place for reading or watching TV that is still next to the kitchen for quick snacks. In the center of all this is a woodstove, although it could also be a fireplace, that can be viewed from the dining and living rooms. There is room to sit next to it when you want to get extra toasty warm. For the original version we chose a metal chimney, but a brick chimney is just as easy to do. And at the end of the house, on the west side so you can enjoy the sunset, is a screened porch. Conveniently located near the kitchen, it can easily double as a summertime dining room.

Go up the stairs to get to the two bedrooms and the large bath. The stairway is filled with light from the two skylights, one at the landing and one at the top of the stairs. Both the dining room and the stairway are light-gathering spaces that bring light into several rooms at once. This way each room in the house gets sunlight from different directions. But first, pause and take a look out over, and down into, the dining room. There is a bench and lots of light, another nice place to read and relax. In fact, you could easily put a desk there and use it as a small office.

The bath has two sinks, a large shower, and a soaking-sized tub. There is a small window in the shower, gathering light from the stairway, a skylight and a large window making the room a sunny one at any time of day. The master bedroom has a dressing room and a small office space. There is also an attic stair going up to the large attic space above the bedroom. The sleeping area has space for dressers, bed, and chairs by the window make for a quiet place to read. There is also another small window that overlooks the dining room and borrows light from the skylight there.

At the other end of the hall, the second bedroom has room for a bed, a small window seat, and a small desk. The seat and desk are under small windows set at eye level when you sit down. From the bed you can look out through the large windows that are placed above the porch roof and face the front of the house. From this bedroom you can enter the second attic storage room that is situated above the garage. This bedroom has a small closet, actually a wardrobe cabinet, because we anticipated it would be used mostly as a guest room. You could use some of that storage room above the garage to increase the closet space.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,942

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . 2,194

2 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Crawl space foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,604 sq. ft.

View Dimension 72’

Side Dimension 32’

Height 25’

Summary

1st Floor 1,024 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 918 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 13’ x 20’

Dining 9’ x 13’

Kitchen 9’ x 12’

Bath–1 5’ x 10’

TV Room 12’ x 12’

Entry Porch 20’ x 7’

Scr. Porch 10’ x 12’

Garage 20’ x 16’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 13’ -6”x 16’

Bedroom–2 13’ x 20’

Bath–2 8’ x 13’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• Elevations

• Elevations

• Sections

• Sections

• Details

• Foundation Plan

• 1st & 2nd flr. Framing

• Electrical Plan

This house needs a flat spot to sit in comfortably. It does especially well when approached from a higher elevation, because you can see it spreading out into its site. The living spaces open out to the east and south, and a great southwestern screened porch makes the downstairs master bedroom seem like it’s outside.

Here’s a house for a couple of college professors that sits at the bottom of a hayfield that slopes down to the water. The house is set at the edge of the field where it starts to become wooded and looks out over the water. It’s a very gentle and refined site and I wanted to make sure the house would complement this landscape rather than competing with it.

The entry side faces north and is the most formally composed. You can see a number of volumes fitted together, and the stair tower to the second floor is the most prominent. Low-pitched hipped roofs allow the house to appear to be spreading out into the field and the second floor emerges from the center of the house, crouched under its own roof—and all of this faintly reminds me of farmhouses in Tuscany where I think a stuccoed version of this house might feel quite at home.

As you move around the house to the south side and the view to the water, everything opens up into glass and corners that let the light inside. From the small entry porch you can either go right into the main space, or turn left and enter into a mud room/laundry that then leads through a pantry into the kitchen. The kitchen is perched on the shoulder of the main space and is command central.

A striking feature of this house is the long living room that stretches the full length of the house. We created this room to give a home to a concert grand piano that the clients own and use all the time. They didn’t want a separate music room because they want the music in the center of their lives. As it works out, the piano creates a buffer between the front door and stairs to the upstairs and the more sedentary seating area around the wood stove at the south end. If you aren’t lucky enough to have a grand piano, this area of the living room could, with some furniture arranging, become another section of the living room devoted to more internal things like television watching.

The entire west side of the downstairs is a master bedroom suite. The bedroom itself is big enough for a long office counter to be under the low western roof. This bedroom also opens out into the small screened porch, so in the summer time it feels almost like you’re outside.

Upstairs the two girls each have their own almost identical rooms tucked under the eaves. They share their own bath and a sitting area out in the hall that can hold a TV or whatever.

This house is built on a slab to soak up the heat from the winter sun, so there is no basement. You would probably want to have an outbuilding of some type for the extra detritus of your life that would normally find its way into a basement.

With a house that spreads out like this, you are bound to have at least one internal room—in this case the powder room. We include a skylight here, indeed a ventilating skylight, so when you come into the powder room instead of feeling like you are in a closet, there’s daylight, sometimes even a sunbeam, and nice contact with fresh air.

Although modest and compact, I have been in this house with gatherings of 30+ people, and because it’s so easy to move around, in and out of the porches and to the outside, it feels as if it could handle twice that many. And get yourself a grand piano with the money you will save with this very efficient house.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 2,039

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . 2,207

3 – Bedrooms

2 1⁄2 – Bathrooms

Slab foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,696 sq. ft.

View Dimension 48’

Side Dimension 40’

Height 21’-3”

Summary

1st Floor 1,447 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 592 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 16’ x 36’

Dining 8’ x 10’

Kitchen 12’ x 10’

Bedroom–1 16′-6″ x 14′

Bath-1 9’-6” x 10’

Bath–2 5’ x 4’

Entry Porch 7’-6” x 4’

Scr. Porch 12’ x 10’

Deck 20’ x 22’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–2 12’ x 14’

Bedroom–3 12’ x 14’

Bath–3 7’ x 10’

Working Drawings

• Schedules

• 1st flr. Plan

• 2nd flr. Plan

• Elevations

• Sections

• Details

• Interior Elevations

• Foundation Plan

• Framing

• Mechanical

• Electrical Plan

With strong western and southern views, this house will work well on a sloping site where the land falls to the water. All essential functions are on one floor with an accessible path and there are a lot of outdoor living spaces. A contemporary interpretation of New England cottages, it will feel at home on either coast or in between.

Our clients had a beautiful hillside that looks westwardly into Penobscot Bay. Granite ledges stepped away down the hill to the west, and a grove of mature spruce trees made the site private and gave it a great sense of place. Unfortunately, the granite ledge was so erratic that we knew it would be tough to find a place where we could build and that difficulty led to trying to make as compact a house as we could.

Hipped roofs are a natural for this kind of square plan, and that worked well for this house because we wanted it to seem low and ground hugging as you approach it from the southeast and look down on it from higher on the hill. The building gets tucked into the ledge on the east, then the ground falls away to the west and the building becomes three stories tall with a walkout basement. It could handle being this tall on the water side because it is surrounded by a grove of 60-foot tall spruce trees which frame it and keep the house in scale.

We concentrated a great deal of glass on the south side in the kitchen and the dining room so the house would be sunny and warm, then concentrated another cluster of windows on the west where the view is best. On the east side that faces into the hill and the north side that faces into cold winter winds, we let the roof come down lower to the ground and minimized the glazing. You can feel the house embracing the south and the west and turning its back to the north.

Likewise, we wrapped the south and west with porches and decks because we knew that on this difficult site, our clients would need decks and porches in order to enjoy being outside. This is not a site where you can step out your door onto the lawn.

In order to keep the house sunny, we put a pergola of sloped beams instead of a porch roof over the southeast end of the porch. This allows the roofline to run through and minimizes the impact of a two story high wall. The pergola makes it comfortable to sit out on this deck, but the kitchen and dining room inside won’t be made dark by too much roof.

On the southwest a screened porch anchors this corner of the house focused on the best view. This is an outdoor room that will be the primary living space on many long summer afternoons in Maine, and we wanted it to have prominence. Since it’s right on the corner you can look out past it to the south and west from inside the house, and it doesn’t

seem in your way.

Upstairs we wrapped two bedrooms and a bath around a slightly expanded stair hall that doubles as an office. Placing a roof window in the east roof at just the right height allows you to look out and see who’s coming when you’re upstairs in this office. These upstairs bedrooms are small, but both connect to an upstairs balcony over the screened porch, giving them an added dimension.

Although we designed this house to meet the challenges of this rockbound Maine site, it would do fine anywhere with a strong southern and western focus and an easterly approach. A hillside sloping steeply to the west would be nice, but with some modifications to decks this house could be built quite nicely on a flat site.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,647

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . . 2,070

3 – Bedrooms

2 1⁄2 – Bathrooms

Walk-out basement

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,940 sq. ft.

View Dimension 44’

Side Dimension 53’-6”

Height 24’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 1,162 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 485 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living/Din. 20’ x 22’

Kitchen 16’ x 12’

Bedroom–1 15’ x 16’

Bath–1 14’ x 9’

Entry Porch 7’-6” x 7’-6”

Rear Porch 7’ x 14’

Scr. Porch 14’ x 14’

Side Deck 30’ x 8’

Rear Deck 10’ x 20’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–2 14’ x 10’

Bedroom–3 10’ x 20’

Bath–2 10’ x 6’

Roof Deck 6’ x 6’

Working Drawings

• Basement Plan

• 1st flr. Plan,

2nd flr. Plan, Schedules

• Elevations

• Sections

• Sections

• Details

• Interior Elev./Kitchen

• Foundation Plan

• 1st & 2nd flr. Framing

• Roof Framing

• Electrical Plan, Schedule

A very spacious, single story house with a walk out basement (though that’s not essential), this is a very good waterfront home with a more contemporary treatment. Very cost effective finishes and window treatments maximize return on the construction dollar in a house that’s a lot of fun to be in.

The success of this house comes from the kind of merging of site, client, program, and builder that every architect is always looking for.

My clients had gotten a beautiful corner of a peninsula that looked into a quiet cove. It had a little knoll so the house could sit a bit proudly above the water, and allow a walkout basement for the easy storage of kayaks and waterfront stuff. Although there was a very limited budget, the clients were very clear about their needs. When our design and their desires got over that budget, we had a meeting and laid out the alternatives to get back on course. They made the tough choices and the house stayed focused on the prime mission.

We were after a simple, easy-to-build structure that would have a large central living space flanked by a master bedroom suite on the east and two bedrooms and a bath on the west. No stone fireplace, rooftop balconies, or fancy trim details would get in the way of having a house that was easy to keep clean, easy to come and go from, and easy to live in for an extended three generation family—and affordable. We needed to build it for under $200,000 (in 1999) but still have it be a house that would grace a very beautiful site.

The first version of this house had a loft space over the kitchen area, with stairs that went up over the staircase that goes down to the basement. But this pushed us over our clients’ budget and they realized that they didn’t need it. Without the loft, the main space is too cavernous, so we put in a few columns and beams, like an indoor pergola to give the kitchen a more defined sense of space. It was a good tradeoff. The clients gave up space that they didn’t really need but got a wonderfully varied high-ceilinged space with a great south-facing 5 ́ diameter round window that lets a beam of sunlight play over the entire room.

Since this is a single story house we used a relatively low-pitched roof that didn’t enclose too much volume. We didn’t want the house on this waterfront site to seem like a suburban ranch house, so on the approach side we carved a large, welcoming entry porch out of the house volume, and on the water side brought the roofs down low over a window seat sitting area.

This lower roof created a more intimate seat- ing area in the southwest corner of the living space where the view was best, and from the outside made the house appear to flow down the hill toward the water. We initially wanted a glass roof over this sitting area, but to keep to the budget we backed off to several Velux roof windows. We got almost all of the effect with half the cost.

There is a modest deck that’s partially sheltered by a roof that is accessed from the living room and master bedroom. Stairs lead to a larger lower deck that is more sheltered from the wind, is below the view from the window seat area, and continues the “stepping down the hill” started by the roof over the window seat. This stepping down deck tends to mask the open space under the upper deck that leads to the walkout basement, and when you approach this house from the water you aren’t oppressed by a large shadowy area under overhanging decks high above you.

Cottage-like houses often benefit from traditional windows with muntin bars, but we felt that since this house is a combination of simpler shapes and very simple trim details, it would do fine with large single lights of glass, thus saving dollars.

I can’t promise you the great contractor we had here, or the incredibly easy site, or even that you will be as resolute as our clients, but this house will deliver a lot of living for a modest amount if you do your part.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,572

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . .2,443

3 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Walk-out basement

Dimensions

Foot Print 2,380 sq. ft.

View Dimension 52’

Side Dimension 50’

Height 18’-10”

Summary

1st Floor 1,516 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living/Din. 24’ x 19’

Kitchen 12’ x 15’

Bedroom–1 16’ x 15’

Bedroom–2 14’ x 10’

Bedroom–3 14’ x 14’

Bath–1 16’ x 9’

Bath–2 8’ x 5’

Entry Porch 12’ x 10’

Working Drawings

• 1st flr. Plan, Schedules

• Elevations, Details

• Elevations

• Sections

• Sections

• Details

• Foundation Plan, Details

• 1st flr. Framing

• Roof Framing, Details

• Electrical Plan

A tall building with a tower room and a progression of rooms as you climb higher. The master bedroom suite is upstairs, but it can be swapped for a downstairs bedroom later in life. A working greenhouse makes this a great home for gardeners.

Small scale spaces and lots of contact with the outside distinguish this house that was designed to sit in a forest of low-to-moderate height Jack pines on a slope above a granite quarry. The site is like a Japanese garden of gnarled old pines with beautiful expanses of bare granite. Our clients, a professional couple, wanted a small house that would be intimate and connected with the natural beauty all around them—and one with enough variety of spaces that they could survive the long Maine winters without tripping over each other.

Being in the trees on the top of a (very low) mountain meant that if we could get a bit higher than normal, we would get a long distance view to the water. I climbed a few trees and surmised that getting up about 20 feet would get us the view without the house sticking out of the forest and shouting too much. This is always something to consider with tall houses: do they have enough of a backdrop that they won’t look silly and out of place?

The living, dining, and kitchen areas are all contiguous, but each has its distinct sense of place, and a different set of views to the outside. On the north side of the house is a downstairs guest suite with a bathroom that doubles as a powder room. The screened porch is on the northwest corner, where I like it because you can see the sunsets in the summer in the northwest. This is when screened porches tend to get used, and on this corner it never shades the rest of the house in the winter when the sun is low in the south and you need it.

The entire second floor is the master bedroom suite, with a stair hall that does double duty as a library/office, and on the third floor is the tower room. This library/office is a good example of expanding a circulation space just a bit so that it can do double duty as something else—in this case as an office that looks down through an interior window to the kitchen and up the narrow staircase to the tower.

The functional program didn’t ask for the tower space, and that’s good because the view is spectacular and it needs to be many rooms, none of which are limited to a specific function.

Back on the first floor, there is a pretty extensive (for a 1,900± square foot house) greenhouse to bring a bit of summer in the long Maine winters. My clients are serious gardeners and wanted a full working greenhouse, rather than a solarium/sun room with a few plants. We still were able to have a window connecting it to the kitchen so the warm earth smells can waft into the house, but it’s still a greenhouse where you can water plants with a hose.

The other tall house in the collection, “A Tall Place at the Edge,” is quite stark and a very simple powerful shape. This house is a collection of forms that culminate in the tower. On the interior, “A Tall Place” has a great deal of open vertical space-you can look up through all three stories. This house fills its internal volume with floor space, so there is less vertical drama, but more privacy and spatial variety.

But both houses need sites that support their vertical nature by providing the right backdrop.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,484

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . . . . . . .1,929

2 – Bedrooms

2 – Bathrooms

Greenhouse Slab foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,698 sq. ft.

View Dimension 58’

Side Dimension 38’

Height 33’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 1,244 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 527 sq. ft.

3rd Floor 144 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 22’ x 11’-6”

Dining 12’ x 12’

Kitchen 12’ x 12’

Bedroom–1 11’ x 11’-6”

Bath–1 10’ x 6’

Greenhouse 20’ x 10’

Entry Porch 14’ x 7’

2nd Floor

Bedroom–2 17’-6” x 12’

Office 14’ x 5’

Bath–2 12’ x 6’

3rd Floor

Tower Room 12′ x 12′

Working Drawings

• 1st flr. Plan, Schedules

• 2nd & 3rd flr. Plan

• Elevations

• Elevations

• Sections

• Sections

• Details

• 1st flr. Electrical Plan

• 2nd & 3rd flr Electrical Plan

• Foundation Plan, Details

• 2nd flr. Framing

• 3rd flr. & Roof Framing

• Tower Framing, Details

A low profile house with a very compact footprint with views to the south and east. The open plan gives it a surprising sense of space inside. A good choice for sites where height restrictions keep things low, or where a low house simply looks good

Lucia’s Little Houses > House #02

An Island

A low profile house with a very compact footprint with views to the south and east. The open plan gives it a surprising sense of space inside. A good choice for sites where height restrictions keep things low, or where a low house simply looks good.

A house built by a customer:

I have always seen this house as an island in a sea of woods or fields. In our clients’ case it was a second growth spruce and cedar forest a bit inland from the Maine coast.

With no commanding long distance view, I wanted to design a centrally planned house that would create its own place in a somewhat undifferentiated landscape, a house that would become an island of order that would order the landscape around it. This is an old idea in architecture, but it usually is done with a bit more boasting than this unpretentious cottage.

In this plan the bedrooms and bathroom are attached around central eating, living and dining spaces. These areas are open to the east and south—east as opposed to west because the approach is from the east and I always like the kitchen to have a command of the approach (if possible), and because in colder climates I like the morning side of the house to have lots of glass to soak up the morning sun and start warming the house. Late in the day the western sun tends to cause overheating, and so that is where we put the small screened porch. It is in the afternoon that one is likely to have time to sit and enjoy the mosquito-free comfort of a screened porch.

The outside deck augments the living space with easy access from the screened porch and the dining room, affording a lot of casual coming and going from deck to inside. It’s important to use the relatively inexpensive space provided by decks and screened porches to augment the limited interior space of very small houses. The deck here is around 500 square feet, about half as big as the first floor area of this house, which is 1,132 square feet.

An unusual feature that I really like in this house is the kids’ bedrooms (two and three) which are only about 65 sq. feet. Tiny as they are, they work because we designed lofts above the floor up under the roof. You can see them as a dotted line. The kids climb up to their beds (or play areas) via ladders. There is even a small door (optional) that connects the two loft spaces. The lofts use all the volume under the roof as added floor.

The parent’s houseguests get the loft space over the entry area; this has a ship’s ladder to get to it. The fireplace and wood stove act like an anchor that holds this centrally oriented assemblage together. It creates an entry foyer on its north side and a hearth on its south side, and holds up the guests’ loft.

The dining room off to the southeast projects like a peninsula from the house so that it gets the sun all day long. It has the feel of a sheltered part of the porch when the big double hung windows are open in the summer.

This house was designed for summer use, where I think it works fine for its family of four. Living there year round one might consider bumping the kids’ rooms out with bays like the parents got. Our clients are prospering (with only an occasional grumble), living there with two growing kids, so you can too.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses. Click here to order.

House Details

Heated square feet. . . . . . . . 1,237

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . 1,546

3 – Bedrooms

1 – Bathroom

Crawl space foundation

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,824 sq. ft.

View Dimension 48’

Side Dimension 47’

Height 18’

Summary

1st Floor 1,132 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 105 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 20’ x 20’

Dining 12’ x 12’

Kitchen 9’ x 11’

Bedroom–1 11’ x 11’

Bedroom–2 8’ x 8’

Bedroom–3 8’ x 8’

Bath–1 8’ x 10’

2nd Floor

Loft 10’ x 10’

Working Drawings

• 1st flr. Plan

• 2nd flr. Plan

• Sections

• Elevations

• Fndtn. Plan, 1st flr. Framing

• 2nd flr./Roof Framing

• Wall Section, Details

• Interior Elevations (Kitchen)

Fireplace Section

• Electrical Plans

Planned around a Finnish stove in the center, this house is warm and cozy even on sites without a lot of sunshine. The step down into the living room gives the entire ground floor a sense of expansiveness.

This is a very compact house with what I feel is a decided Scandinavian tone (Tapio is a wood deity in Finland), designed for a couple with strong ties to Finland.

Tall trees uphill to the south meant limited winter solar gain, so we concentrated on creating good energy-retention, and probably more important, a very cozy feeling inside. The series of interlocking spaces revolves around a wonderful Finnish soapstone stove in the center of the house, and because the house is small, nobody is ever too far from this radiant heat source.

Come in the front door and there is a little cubby on the left to sit down in and take off your boots and hang up your cap. Walk into the entry area and there are the stairs and the big west-facing window for the sunset on your left, and a kitchen on the right that’s big enough for a few people to work in and a few more people to hang out around.

Wander down a few steps to the living room. Sinking that floor a foot gives a surprising feeling of spaciousness and a strong sense of place for this conversation area. A key to making small houses work is a willingness to look at the traditional roles of rooms and to change and resize them to fit the way you actually live. The former furniture repository, known as the “living room,” is now a small but very important place to sit in a comfortable chair and talk to a few people.

You can step up to a small library that takes up the north end of the dining space. Here the ceiling gets low to the east, increasing both the sense of enclosure and the impact of the low skylights. While this space makes a nice little homework or reading space, it also serves double duty as expansion space for the dining area to the south. The table can get longer and this can become the biggest room in the house when you have a party.

In the southeast corner is a pantry. Pantries work well to keep costs down because it is much cheaper to store a lot of food and china in a closet with open shelves than it is to store it in a wall of cabinets where you can never find stuff anyway.

Upstairs the guest room is on the right, and on the left is a compact master bedroom. It has a stunning 6-foot round window that somehow gives this room a sense of owning the view. Best of all is the private balcony off the sauna where you can stand outside in the winter and steam, or step outside on a summer morning while you’re waking up.

This house works best on a site with a view in the opposite direction from the approach, and a forested, or at least hilly, terrain. I don’t think it would prosper on a flat undifferentiated lot because it has too much compressed energy and it needs to be in a more containing visual environment.

Working drawings provide you with the architectural documentation you (or your builder) need to build this house. Working drawing sets vary for each of the houses.

Details

Heated sq. ft. . . . . .1,523

Adjusted sq. ft. . . . .1,690

2 – Bedrooms

1 – full Bathroom

2 – half Bathrooms

Sauna, walk-out basement

Dimensions

Foot Print 1,092 sq. ft.

View Dimension 32’

Side Dimension 36’

Height 21’-6”

Summary

1st Floor 864 sq. ft.

2nd Floor 659 sq. ft.

1st Floor

Living 11’ x 16’

Dining 9’ x 19’

Kitchen 15’ x 9’

Pantry 5’ x 9’-6”

Bath–1 4’-6” x 5

2nd Floor

Bedroom–1 11’ x 9’-6”

Bedroom–2 11’ x 9’-6”

Bath/Sauna 5’-6” x 7’

Working Drawings

• 1st & 2nd flr. Plans

• Elevations

• Sections/Schedules

• Fndtn Plan, 1st flr. Framing

• 2nd flr. Framing, Kitchen

• Details

• Electrical Plans