The client brief was quite extensive for the Kenosha Residence project, and the project provided an exciting opportunity to fully embrace the mid-century modern style - an iconic design style that's very much at home in Southern California.
In line with the design style, a lot of attention was paid to the layout and the function of the space. The house's open floor plan connects the public areas while maintaining privacy for the bedrooms.
The decision to maintain an open flow from the public areas to the outdoor patio allows for a seamless indoor-outdoor living experience and is a hallmark of the mid-century modern style.
The roof plan and structure also kept to the mid-century modern design ethos, with a simple, low-slope roof and a lot of emphases on exposing the structural elements.
This philosophy was also reflected in the window design, where windows were treated as structural elements, creating strong horizontal lines that add to the sense of openness and space.
Speaking about the trellis, the original trellis was redesigned to take full advantage of the magnificent view of the bay, while also offering shade. The new design created a dramatic undulating roofline that's not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing.
In terms of materials, the use of clear story windows, masonry, and block walls further reinforced the mid-century modern aesthetic, creating a home that feels open and airy, yet grounded and substantial.
However, due to budget constraints, some elements like the clear story windows and the pivot front door were value-engineered out of the final project.
Nonetheless, the project was successfully executed, with compromises made to stay within budget without sacrificing the integrity of the design.
Overall, the Kenosha Residence project was a major success, and it beautifully embodies the principles of mid-century modern design.
From the open floor plan to the thoughtful use of materials, every aspect of the design works together to create a home that is functional, aesthetically pleasing, and in harmony with its surroundings.
In the end, the project was a testament to the importance of staying true to the design vision, even in the face of challenges and constraints. It also demonstrates the power of good design to enhance the quality of life for our clients, creating a home that is not only beautiful but also functional and responsive to their needs and lifestyle.
Hi, I'm Sean Canning, principal architect at Ten Seventy Architecture, and today you're watching our Design Rewind series. This is a video series where I turn back the clock and take a look at some of the earliest projects in my architecture career, some of the earliest projects of 10 70 architecture. So as always, we're gonna break this down into three parts.
First, we're gonna look at the client brief. Then we're gonna do an in depth. Design breakdown. And finally, I'm gonna wrap things up with the conclusion and tell you what happened with the project and what happened with the client. So let's get this one started. So today we're looking at the Kenosha residence.
And the Kenosha residence for me was kind of the first project where I really got to say, this is the style I wanna work in. And now I have a client and a home that agrees with that style. So it's kind of like my first project. Completely within the style of modernism where I didn't have to kind of sneak in modern concepts or basically the client just wanted me to match a mid-century modern style, which is a cool style universally, one of the favorite modernist styles and an iconic style to California.
So, needless to say, I was very excited about this projects. So this is the project location right here. You can see it kind of sits on a little bit of a steep hill over here overlooking this highway. The scope of work was a master bathroom addition, partial interior remodel, an exterior trellis landscaping design, and various exterior improvements.
So a lot of stuff going on here. Basically had to change the entire house, the entire site. And this project was also on a tight budget as well. The project zoning is single family. And one of the challenges on this project was because the budget was so tight, we didn't have a lot of money for the contractor.
So the contractor we were working with had a lot of limitations. For example, he was completely unable to read any of the details on my drawing package, which certainly made for some challenges during construction.
This is a floor plan of the existing home. So the street is kind of over here, and you'd enter the home here. You enter into the public space, which is basically living room, dining room, and kitchen. And then the house has 1, 2, 3 bedrooms and a garage. Now you may notice that if you pull your car into the garage, There's really no way into the home.
You'd have to come back outta the garage and enter here. So the formal and informal entry could be looked at as basically occurring in the same exact location right here. Now some of these drawings were in my. In my project folder, but I don't remember what all of them were used for. So this is a series of drawings, which seems to be highlighting the different private spaces of the home.
And there you go. That's all the private spaces of the home, which means that these are basically the public spaces of the home. I don't exactly remember why I broke it down like this, but I'm sure this is something I presented the client. Now most mid-century modern homes have a very simple roof plan.
So this one does two. You basically have a ridge here, perpendicular ridge here over the garage. Very straightforward. Here's a roof plan with some shading, and ultimately this was the design we came up with here. So you can see some of the really low slope roof angles that. Occur commonly in mid-century design.
Now, the existing home actually had a trellis, which kind of did this. It just continued down, and then it was supported here, so it got very low over here. And the project site has this amazing view down to the bay over here. So the clients, this was just not working for the clients. So w we ended up doing was basically taking this slope and matching it over here.
So you have this kind of undulation of slopes going on. So here's a low bearing wall. So we supported this in here with a beam. We have different posts here to support these. These beams in here. And then there's a beam underneath here, which kind of catches the whole thing and runs down to a post down here.
And if this was to continue out, there'd be a post down here. So that's basically how the whole home is supported. This is a load-bearing wall, which is kind of removed because it's a section drawing, but that's basically the way the whole home works. So the idea was pretty simple. It was, if this is bad, And that is average, wouldn't that be better than average?
And that's what we, that's what we were trying to discover on this, on this design. These are some drawings of the front elevation. So if I remember correctly, this block wall was kind of already there. I wanted to redesign these staircase, these stairs here, and I had proposed to cut back the roof here to expose these rafters, which were already existing.
So that was a pretty low. Cost way to create a cool mid-century detail. While this home is, looks like a mid-century modern home, it was just built as a tracked home and it lacked a lot of the really cool details you see in in, in mid-century modern architecture. Here's some of the components that were, that I kind of highlighted.
I think what I'm trying to show here is there's a lot of horizontality going on in here with these different elements. And this was a new door that we were looking to looking to replace. And one of the things I used to do a lot, and actually we still do, is we kind of treat these areas between windows as if they're part of the windows.
So it unifies this entire, this entire area here. So just creating lots of horizontal lines. There's a SketchUp rendering of how this would look. We have a little rain drain here. We got those exposed. Rafters, new pivot door and new entry stair, and there's the backyard. We went through a bunch of different iterations on what this would look like, and this is like really more of a job for a landscape designer than an architect because a lot of this stuff was just not in my, not in my toolbox at the time.
Also here you can see originally we had planned four posts, but that eventually got changed to just. Two, two posts with one beam, which was much better. This was that front pivot door that got, and that ended up getting value engineered outta the project. Here you can see I have this metal casing for this window to really create this like horizontal window option that got value engineered outta the project, but the front still ended up coming out pretty cool.
I had planned some clear story windows up above. I don't remember if we did those or not. And you see the one thing I'm trying to do is I'm trying to align things with the structure. So you can see that beam right there in mid-century modern architecture, you almost always expose the structure because the structure is inherently functional.
So from a form follows function perspective of modernism, you wanna show the structure. And mid-century modernism really leans into that. So here this would be the post, but you wouldn't see that because the wall supports it. But you would just see. The, the area here between the two windows, which serves as that post.
So really trying to just show all of the support and tell the homeowner visually how the home is supported.
Trying to do the same thing here with this window division. This is a fireplace in here. And yeah, here you see without the t trellis. And then once we add the trellis, and remember, these two posts ended up getting eliminated.
This was a new block wall here, which we designed to match the front block wall, which was existing. There's that trellis.
So this is the interior looking out. This was a part of a new kitchen design that ended up changing quite a bit by the end of the project. And here's kind of a whole assembly series of assembly photos of how this thing got built. So there was that beam. You can see how you actually doubled those up, which was really cool.
And that's basically how it ended up looking. And now you can see the doors open and the doors dock, right, right up against these areas here. And, you know, the whole living room, dining room, and kitchen flow out onto this patio. And here's some finished photos. This photo for some reason has a strange lens on it, and it looks like this is a little more flat than it actually is.
But you'll see in the other photos it's, there's that beautiful view. We were really trying to take advantage of. And the fence here ended up getting value engineered out of the project. So originally this was designed, but it was a little too expensive to replace, so the client ended up just painting it and leaving it there.
There's that block wall we did to match the front. This is the master bedroom, which also opens up, and you can come over to the patio from the master bedroom. Also worked with Dene Netto of Netto Design on this project, and she selected some really awesome furniture that I would not have been able to pick out myself.
There you go. I think this is supposed to be me and the client. There's a section of the whole thing, and you can really get an idea of that structure there.
You can see different, trying to see how much light is gonna come into the space because this faces west and anytime something face west, you get hit with a lot of low angle sun. So really trying to figure out how much sunlight is gonna be in that space at different times of the day. This is ultimately the front the front render that I think the client went with, if I remember correctly.
He really liked this electric blue door here.
There's the whole thing, and we try to match. Anytime we bring in, in one color, try to match it somewhere else on the project.
See this was one of the options for the back wall, which was a CMU block with some glass on top. Basically reducing the amount of glass, which reduced the cost, but still allows the visibility and pulling this in to match this and the element on the front,
another iteration of the backyard there. They ultimately end up going with something very similar to this.
This did not happen ultimately. And here's some construction photos. So this was the front stairs being constructed. This was that block wall being constructed. And then they came in and poured a whole slab in here. You can see these posts are already set. That's what's that? I think it's actually this post, which is supporting the house.
And this one is mostly just aesthetic. It does have some load bearing capacity. These posts end up carrying the beam, which carries all of the, all of those Charles members on top. And you can see this is a detail I worked out a long time ago with my structural engineer, Curtis Patterson, a Patterson Engineering basically best engineer in town.
And we sync the footings underneath the slab. So this comes in here.
And then we come, come back and pour the whole finished slab. So what you get is basically a super clean post where you don't see the footing and you don't see any, any hardware.
Here it is coming together. So again, the structure was basically post post beam. We put a little post up here. And then when we came across with these posts sorry, those beams, we ended up bolting in here, boom, boom, bolting in here.
And we tapered this very thin so that it would appear basically as light as possible. Could kind of see that here with the view in the background. It's a pretty cool photo,
mid-century modern lighting. Here, you see that detail with no, there's no plate. If you poured the footing with, with the slab, you'd end up with a plate like this, which kind of detracts from the whole minimalist aesthetic of it. Later on, the client came back and they installed some, some artificial turf.
Here we have this kind of black river rock aesthetic going on in here. Here's a whole plan here. So here's the street on this side. You'd enter here, come through here. I think this was the, this was the existing plan, and this one is my plan. I believe so now the street is over here. We enter here and we have post, post, post and little ball here.
So all that ended up getting open patio's over here. We redid this master bed bedroom and bathroom. Here's some elevations.
Look at this. My old drawing set, 2013. Here's a little diagram and I think what we were looking at here was different sliding door options. So you can see here I have a big door, pivot door, man door. And yeah, so this one slides over this one actually. This is just a fixed door and this one opens. So that was one of the options.
Here's another option where we have some sort of bifold thing going on. Here's, this was the option we went with where we have three bifold options. So we got this look
and there's a diagram, which basically shows how the public spaces here are supposed to flow out in this direction. Here's a front elevation. So this was in Bejo.
Here's a front entry. Here's a floor plan. Again, here's a tr, here's that showis again, section and elevation. And here's some finished photos. So in this one, you can actually really see how cool this is when this slopes upward. And now how cool This is with all of the structural beam, these structural posts in here, counterbalanced by these beams, and we have 1, 2, 3, 9 foot door systems which can open up for a total of 27 feet of, of clear opening right out to your patio.
There's that connection detail. There's that awesome view.
A little bit of a hazy day there.
We did end up incorporating an angle into the landscaping to try to pick up on the angle that we had kind of created over here. So, There's me,
this is one of my favorite moments for the project. Not the best masonry work, but I think the stack bond eight by eight. These, these are eight by eight masonry. And stack bond means it's kind of like a grid pattern rather than a brick pattern. Just worked really nice and contrasted by this angle, I think was really, really beautiful.
This is the front of the house, front door. I'm not sure why it ended up being green, cuz we had talked a lot about it being electric blue. But one, one reason or another ended up being green.
These are different fence options, so that was one option. You can kind of see all the glasses infilled here. Maybe that's like a wood or some sort of hardy material. And then a couple years after we finished this project, the clients actually came back to me and it was a husband and wife couple, and the husband was a drummer, so he asked me to design a drum studio in his garage where he would still be able to park one car.
So that's kind of what we have here, where you can park a car here, and then the studio was a double wall, was double walled. Everything was kind of structurally isolated. Two doors here. So basically he'd be able to play his drums as loud as he wanted in here. And while it was a little tight which kind of the space was there originally in the garage and we only had half a garage to work.
But I had designed the space to be as tight as possible, eliminate a lot of the excessive noise transfer, and try to keep the, the base, the low frequency base sounds down with this double wall structure here. So that was a fun project to detail out because I had never done anything that acoustically responsible.
Acoustically responsible. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
And here's like a before and after. So obviously this is before and this is after. So what happened with the projects? And what happened with the client? Well, the project was a success. This is one of my earliest successes. Pretty simple project, all things considered a first project doing mid-century modern first project where the home was modern before I got to it the client ended up becoming a good friend of mine and we actually ended up seeing a couple Guns and Roses concerts together when they came around San Diego a few years ago.
Unfortunately the husband and wife couple that I work for here ended up divorced and the wife ended up with the house as part of that divorce and she wasn't as involved in the design phase as the husband was. In fact she was barely involved in the design phase. So that was a little disappointing.