Hi, I'm Sean Canning, Principal Architect at 1070 Architecture, and you're watching the Design Rewind video series. This is a video series I put together to turn back the clock and show you some of my earliest projects in my architecture career. As usual, we're going to go through three parts in this video.
So first, I'm going to discuss the client brief. Then I'm going to do a little bit of a deep dive into the design breakdown. And finally, I'm going to end with the conclusion where I tell you what happened with the clients and what ultimately happened with the project. Today we're going to focus on the Little Italy residence.
So this was my first project in Little Italy, and this is probably one of the smaller projects that I've ever worked on in San Diego. As a student, I would take on projects like this more often, but as a professional, it's very hard to make money on this type of project. So the scope of work on this project is...
And into your master bathroom and closet remodel. Now that's why it's really so hard to make a lot of money on this project, because there's not a lot of money in this project. Basically I did this project for a friend. We can't take on these types of projects anymore as a professional company with five employees because they would just take too long and there's not enough of a design budget in them.
So this was a single family zone at the time, and the project challenge was the extremely tight budget. Like I said, it was a friend, so the person, my clients were very young, a newly married couple, I think new homeowners at the time, and they just didn't have a lot of money for a bathroom and a closet remodel.
But it was an old home, and this certainly was going to make a huge improvement. So... This was the design we came up with. I think this was actually my construction drawings at the time and I believe this is one of my first construction drawings I ever put together with SketchUp layout, which is what we use full time now in the office.
So let's take a look at this and see if we can make some sense of this. Okay, so over here you can see the master bedroom. I believe that was existing and part of the request was to Yeah, this was a new door that was added from an existing window. So we turned a window into a door, we removed the door here and added a wall here and a door here.
So essentially we took this whole hallway and now that's all part of the interior of the master suite. Then we took some space from the closet over here, and we made that into a larger walk in closet. So now the walk in closet does this. And that basically gives the homeowners an ability to hang some clothes on this side, and also on this side.
So it's pretty efficient closet layout, all things considered, because we still have space for the closet in the adjacent bedroom over here to hang some more clothes. And usually the corner becomes a dead spot, so to take that out of this closet, I don't think that was such a bad move. We put the toilet in its own little vestibule here, which is something that I prefer and I try to recommend to my clients.
We have the shower shown here with a door on that side, and then we have a double sink. In the vanity over here, sync, sync. A couple other things you'll notice is we have a window right here. And that window is positioned directly on axis with this entry point. We also don't have any door over here on this entry.
So that's what makes this door here so important. Now I'd actually gone to the level of detail to Talk about where to install the blocking for a toilet paper holder, towel rod, and those types of things. That's not always something that we will do in a set of construction drawings, but if we're going to do a project this small, I would get into that level of detail.
Here's some lighting plans and electrical plans. So I usually like to locate my lights kind of on axis. You see that quite a bit. You always have to have some sort of lighting over here so you don't create a shadow from this light on your floor. On your face when you're looking in the mirror. Some lights in the walk in closet.
It's own switch and fan over here. Today we would put that in one fixture. And same with this. We've been using Panasonic exhaust fans. The Whisper Green fans. They're a great series. Back then I used to do a lot of work by hand. I don't do as much work by hand anymore. But here's some examples of the options that I had presented those clients.
So, slightly different option here. Different option here.
And I think this blueprint here, that was the existing blueprint of the home. So I'm just tracing over that. Number three, number four, number five. So I presented lots of options and I let the clients pick which option they thought was best. Here's some SketchUp models. So back then, my SketchUp skills were very limited.
These days, we have, we produce some really awesome SketchUp models. So, look, I even went to the level of detail of putting some shoe shelves, some double, double height shelving here.
There's the bedroom, so you can see now the bedroom basically includes all of this space. That's all part of the master suite now.
That's the top view.
Interior of the bathroom. Closet.
This was actually an alternative version. I didn't notice these got mixed in, but here the closet is before the bathroom, so that was an alternate, alternate version. Some of these are, are also alternate versions.
And this is ultimately the one the client selected and the one I produced a set of construction drawings for. So, in conclusion, where did this project end up? Well, the clients did this renovation. They remodeled this bathroom and closet and presumably liked it quite a bit. I think I only spoke with them a few times after the project was over.
They were kind of a friend of a friend. But as far as, as far as I heard back, they loved the design, and I think they still live in the same home with two children now, but they may have sold it. I'm not 100% sure. I hadn't kept up with them. But anyway... I just wanted to show you what a really small project looks like at the beginning of an architect's career.
We don't always get to work on the biggest projects, so sometimes it's about... the master suite renovations and that's okay. But these days we just don't get to do too many of them anymore. So I hope you appreciate this video. If you have a comment, please put it in the YouTube chat. Anyway, like, and subscribe.
