Designing stairs is more intricate task than many people realize. And it’s not just about how the stairs look. Proper proportioning is critical to comfort and safety. Set the tread and riser sizes carefully. For  I recommend 10″ treads with a one inch nosing. The nosing is the projection forward of the tread beyond the riser below. The riser is the vertical portion of the step. I try to keep the riser height under 7 1/2“, preferring to end up with about 7 1/4″ if I can. We’re all getting a bit older and the fraction of an inch can really make a difference in how a staircase feels. On a house with the now fairly common ten foot ceilings, 18 risers will give you risers of about 7 1/3″. If you have a situation where you want to further reduce the riser height to fit a particular situation or if you have bad knees, you can go by the old “Rule of Thumb” that said the riser and tread dimensions, when added together, should equal 17.  So 6 1/2″ risers would be combined with 10 1/2″ treads for maximum comfort. But there are always exceptions to Rules of Thumb, of course.

Terms Used when Designing Stairs

    These riser and tread rules work well for staircases. When we approach a set of stairs, we unconsciously adjust our stride to begin our ascent or descent. But I have found that on interior stairs (or steps) between rooms or in hallways, where there are only two or three risers, people, tend to take the steps in a normal walking stride and will over-step the next tread down if it is too narrow. I have learned that ten inch treads are not wide enough for safety. I had this situation in my own house. I had twelve inch treads shown on the plans and the builder, a good friend and a good builder, mistakenly put in steps with ten inch treads. I let the mistake stand, feeling the cost of the correction was not worth it. But I was wrong. After several people fell, I had to call the builder back in and we changed the steps to the original 12″ treads. No one fell after that, even during parties!

    On exterior stairs, I feel 10″ treads are too narrow and 6″ risers are too tall. These stairs may be wet or covered with snow. The lighting might not be as good as indoors. So for outdoors steps, I make the treads 12″ and the risers between 6″ and 7″, with a preference toward the shorter dimension. If you are building a full staircase, say from a deck to the ground below. You can narrow the tread to 11″ and let the riser grow to 7 ¼”.

        Have you ever wondered why the nosing is there? Why not simply leave it out and make the steps easier to build? The nosing is actually required by the Building Code to make it safer to go down the stairs. When we step down to the next lower step, the ball of our foot touches first and then the heel goes down. If you experiment with your own foot, you will see that your heel will actually seem to go backward as it goes down. The nosing allows some clear space for your heel to drop. If the nosing was not there, your heel would hit the riser and you would stumble forward. Try filling in the space the tread creates with a book or one inch thick board and then step down the step again. Please hold the handrail for safety. You’ll see how your heel wants to catch on the riser and your loss of balance would pitch you forward.

    The real bottom line of all this discussion is to find some steps you feel are comfortable and then measure the treads and risers. If you do this you will quickly learn what dimensions are best for you.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

     People tend to not place enough emphasis on the lighting in their homes. It is often taken for granted and as a result, it is poorly designed.  There are lots of things you can do to reduce your electrical costs, improve the quality of the lighting in your home, avoid construction cost over-runs, and make your house more “green.”

      Natural day-lighting is something that has been under appreciated and undervalued in recent decades. But the current renewed concern about green building and high energy costs have changed that thinking. A good architect can help you orient your house properly on the land to maximize the benefits of free day-lighting without resulting in overheating of the house in summer months. In a well designed house, you should not have to turn on your electric lights during a sunny day. Simply placing windows on the southern walls (in a northern hemisphere site) will gain significant daylight, but the costs to cool the house will soar as the house will overheat badly. You will give up more energy money than you will save. Properly designed overhangs are needed, deciduous plantings, and sometimes shutters or shades can be used to maintain control over the natural lighting in your home. Indirect, reflected daylight is best. Direct sunlight is to be avoided. In addition to the heat gain direct sunlight can give, fabrics and carpets can fade under the intense rays of direct sunlight.

      There are many types of artificial lighting to choose from for your home. And without some training and experience, making the right selection can be tough. Fortunately there are many good lighting stores owned and operated by well trained, knowledgeable people. You can take advantage of their training and experience for free. Most of them will spend a considerable amount of time with you working out a lighting plan for your home, helping you select the best fixtures based on looks, style, type of light the fixture provides, cost of the fixtures, and energy efficiency.

      Having a good, well thought out lighting and electrical plan before you begin construction of your remodeling or new house construction project is one of the keys to controlling homebuilding costs. Costly extras often come from changes people make to the electrical work when they discover things they failed to consider before signing the contract with the builder. The more you can think through your electrical and home lighting plan, the more money you will save and the better lighting your new or remodeled home will have.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

These days, nothing strikes fear into a homeowner’s heart like the news that mold has been found in their house. visions of unknown illnesses and physical maladies flash before their eyes, fueled by incredible lawsuits and media hype. But what is the real threat? How much concern should you have? What should be done?

I’ve been perplexed by this issue and I’ve found that it is very difficult to find dependable information on this subject. Part of the reason for this lack of good information is that no one really knows answers with any scientific foundation. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and based on that research, I’ve come to the following conclusions. As you read these, please keep in mind that I am also among the legions of mold non-experts who have voiced their opinions on the subject. But this information was taken from what I thought were reliable sources. Hopefully this will put the mold issue into perspective.

1. You can not eliminate mold in your house. It is always there. So the best recommendation is to control the moisture in the house by keeping the relative humidity between 30% and 60%. Mold needs moisture and it will grow when the relative humidity is above 60% to 65%. Surfaces that have condensation appear on them will be more prone to growing mold because condensation is 100% humidity, of course.
2. There are over 60,000 known types of mold. Only a few are known toxins. The huge majority of them are benign or their effects are unknown. And they live everywhere around us all the time.
3. Testing for mold has a limited value since nearly every test will show some mold. Even the spore count can be deceiving depending on the reproductive cycle of the mold. Some tests can show large releases only to be followed by extended periods of dormancy. Testing should be done on the outside of the house as a point of comparison. It is possible that similar levels of mold exist all around and the amount found in the crawlspace do not represent anything abnormal. Even the State of California Department of Health does not recommend testing for mold contamination because of the lack of standards for judging what is an acceptable quantity of mold! From what I’ve read, the only way to know if you have too much mold is if you can smell it or see it. Even then, the odds are highly in your favor that the mold you smell is not harmful since the vast majority of mold is not harmful.
4. Most molds produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that become airborne and smell musty. These are offensive, but are not thought to cause illness. Some molds, at certain times do produce toxic chemicals called mycotoxins. If inhaled in sufficient quantities, some people can get sick from these. But this is not an established risk for healthy people. It is more likely in people with weakened immune systems.
5. Molds can trigger asthma attacks or hay fever, but there is no proof that molds cause these ailments. The only cases of molds causing infections in humans are rare and only occur in people with a weakened immune system.
6. Mold can grow on any surface. Metals and other non-porous surfaces are just easier to keep clean than surfaces like wood or paper. However some metals, like copper and zinc form a fungicide when they oxidize. That is why better asphalt shingles are made with zinc granules in with the stone granules to prevent the fungus streaks you often see on roofs in the South. Copper or zinc ridge strips were often used for this purpose, too. But metal duct systems can be easily cleaned and disinfected.
7. Mold can germinate, or “bloom” in as little as twelve hours and start to grow in a day or two. So weekly monitoring is essentially useless. If the moisture is too high, mold will get ahead of you really fast.
8. There are tons of alarmist stories and law suits out there right now so it’s about impossible to sort out the truth. That’s because no one seems to really know the truth.
9. Lawsuits regarding mold almost always point to the builder unless there is some demonstrated neglect by the owners, such as allowing a leak to go unfixed. However, improper detailing can leave architects and engineers with a legal exposure, too. No matter the situation, it is very hard to determine fault with any accuracy since there are many sources of moisture entering a house and because of the lack of scientific data, the damage due to mold is hard to quantify. Still, many of the judgments awarded in mold lawsuits are based on sympathy for the homeowner and not actual facts like many fantastic lawsuits these days.
10. The longer a house is under construction prior to the roof going on and getting the house “dried in”, the more susceptible it will be to mold. Work should proceed expeditiously to let the house get dry as quickly as possible.
11. The greatest risk of mold growth actually occurs during the cooler months when the relative humidity remains above 90% for sustained periods. That would be a day like we had on Wednesday when everything seems to have condensation on it. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but during the high humidity, hot days in the summer, the relative humidity is actually lower than those damp days in the winter. This is because warm air can hold more grains of moisture and the surfaces are warmer and the dewpoint is not reached to cause condensation. Cooler surfaces cause condensation, not warmer ones.
12. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Guidelines on Assessment and Remediation of Fungi in Indoor Environments (2002) is the most widely recognized guide for remediation.
13. One interesting thing I have learned is that mold will not grow on lumber with a moisture content below 20%. And even then, the wood must remain sufficiently wet for approximately seven days.
14. Your yard (and mine) is loaded with mold. Everyone’s is except maybe in Arizona. Even there the spores probably exist, just waiting for a little moisture.

The bottom line is this. Your builder should warrant the health of the house he is turning over to you. However, I don’t know that there is any way he can really certify this since there is no “standard” in the industry. So a measure of reasonableness is required. The mere presence of mold is not a cause for alarm. But a large and visible outbreak of mold needs to be dealt with in a level-headed way. A well-educated builder is the first step in preventing mold. Controlling moisture is the primary mission. If you do that, you will control mold in your house.

If you want another perspective on the validity of the mold health issue, you might find this article, The Mold Scare: Medical facts versus dubious myths, by Gailen D. Marshall Jr., the director of the Allergy & Clinical Immunology Division at The University of Texas Medical School-Houston interesting and enlightening.

Bill Hirsch AIA

www.williamhirsch.com

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

    Good design must have an organizing concept. But even with a good concept, a house can have all the right finishes, the best materials, the finest appliances, everything can be as perfect as it can be-and yet, the house still doesn’t feel right. Why doesn’t it feel like home?

All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”-Philip Johnson     

    If you asked me to give you a short answer to the question, “What will make a house be my perfect house?” I would have to say this: Everything should just seem to be in the right place. Unfortunately, the word “seem” is pretty vague. So it follows that the characteristics that will create Your Perfect House are subjective, and the concepts are sometimes difficult to grasp. These are the immeasurable, unquantifiable aspects of architectural design.

    These issues relate to emotions and to other sorts of perceptions that can’t be described in feet and inches. It’s a little difficult to get your arms around the concepts we’re going to talk about, which may be the reason many books about designing homes do not even attempt to discuss them. But they are vital for you to be aware of so you can be a full partner with your architect in the design of Your Perfect House. I’ll elaborate upon them in future posts. But for now, here are a few key concepts that take a house beyond simple shelter and elevate it to the status of “home.” 

A Home Needs Sequential Progressions-Our Minds Seek Order

    We don’t like to go from silence directly to eardrum-shattering noise. We can’t stand turning on a bright light when our eyes have adjusted to the darkness. There has to be a gradual transition, a segue from one thing to another. It’s the same when we enter a house. We are most comfortable if the journey from the public spaces outside the front door progresses through a thoughtfully designed sequence of increasingly more private spaces, eventually ending at the most private spaces.  

Don’t Design a Building, Design Spaces

    Architects don’t simply design houses. We design spaces. The house is merely the enclosure and definition of those spaces, both inside and outside the house. We think in terms of spaces more than objects.

    When architects design houses, they are actually creating spaces within those houses that will work for the people who will be living in them. This is what a good architect is trained to understand. This is what he should have a sixth sense about. What will the spaces feel like? What size is right? What shape and character is best?

 Control the Scale-Keep It Human

    A room is a stage for human activity. Rooms become important because of what happens within their boundaries. Because the rooms in a house are meant to contain human activities, they should necessarily be sized to match the intended use and therefore always maintain a human scale.

    Architects always want to create spaces that match the function for the users. Let’s say that Joe down the street has a dining room that’s 14 by 16 feet. Fred wants to build a house that will be “even better” than Joe’s. Fred might say, “Hey, I don’t have to have a 14-by-16-foot dining room. I can afford a room that’s 20 by 24.” After all, isn’t bigger better? Not always, I say. An architect can help you discover the proper size and proportion a room should have to suit the function and the particular users of that room, just the same way a suit of clothes should fit the wearer perfectly or the clothing will feel awkward and wrong.

    Making a house a home is a matter of designing the spaces we live in and not simply erecting a building that will keep the water out and the heat inside. It’s about understanding scale, transitions, progressions, order, and aesthetics.

Bill Hirsch

www.williamhirsch.com

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

I recently was asked a question from a person in Philadelphia about how to deal with a very high ceiling in a living room. Here’s the question:

  My nineteen-eighties condo has a 19′ ceiling in the living room that merges with the dining area where the ceiling drops to eight feet. The 19′ fireplace wall is in the corner. Is there any way to make the scale of this 19′ tall room more human? I have purchased numerous original oil paintings that go almost to the ceiling on the wall opposite the French doors. I’m beginning to question this technique. I feel there is so much wasted space that I wanted to make it interesting rather than just filled with air.

Here’s my answer:

Your dilemma with the high ceiling is one that we often face when there is a second floor overlook or balcony into a living room or great room. I can see that you have an appreciation for this problem already.

This is not a new problem. Back in the days before air conditioning in houses, the ceilings in high end houses were often quite high to keep the room cooler in summer. Check out the George Read house on The Strand in New Castle, Delaware for an example. Hot air rises, after all. So they had to deal with this same issue. The solution you will sometimes see is to add a cornice type of moulding part way up the wall, maybe at the 9′ or 10′ level, paint the wall color up to that and then paint the ceiling color on the upper portion of the wall as well as on the ceiling. This would be a trick of the eye that would give the impression of a lower room because your eye and brain would tend to only perceive the color portion of the wall while the ceiling color portion would sort of vanish into the ceiling itself. This trick actually works.

On one house I designed we had to have a two story room because the owners wanted a music loft to overlook the room below. But we also wanted to control the visual height of the room. The room was about 20′ tall with windows on one wall toward the view. I designed an oversized cornice, kind of like a big mantel shelf, that I ran all the way around the room. It projected out from the wall maybe ten inches and was about fourteen inches tall. It was like a very big plate rail. I placed it about thirteen feet above the floor. The wall below the cornice was painted a color, not white. The wall above the cornice was painted a much lighter version of the wall color. Then there was another crown moulding where the wall met the ceiling. The ceiling was given more color to help bring it down. This worked pretty well. The cornice added a strong horizontal line that helped elongate the room. It’s sort of the same principle that applies when you wear horizontal striped clothing. It makes you look wider and shorter, although that’s not an effect most of us want.

 The whole idea is to give your eye a place to stop at the height you select. Although I can’t think of an example off the top of my head of a ready example, I’m sure you can walk around Philadelphia, or any other city, and see a number of buildings that have a cornice line up a story or two, visually defining a height that relates to the people on the street. But then the building continues up many more stories. This is the same principle being used to control the visual height.

I find that fewer and fewer of my clients want the really tall ceilings. Once they have lived with them, they see the down side. If a tall ceilinged room opens to the second floor, sound transmission can be another problem with sounds reflecting off the walls and echoing from one floor to another. Today’s trend seems to be a return to more human scaled rooms.

Bill Hirsch

www.williamhirsch.com

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

    Garage doors are often one of the ugliest features on the exterior of a house. There are now quite a few “carriage house” type doors to choose from that look much better than the traditional flat or raised panel doors. But those special doors come at a significant cost increase. There are other solutions you might want to consider.

    Garage doors are often an unsightly feature simply because of their scale. We human beings tend to prefer objects that are an appropriate size or scale to our own size. The doors and windows of your house will be most appealing when they are size-appropriate to the people who will occupy the house. They will “express” an interaction with other people. On a subconscious level, we can emotionally connect with architectural features like that. Garage doors must, by their very nature, be sized and scaled to the automobiles that must pass through them. Garage doors end up being the largest doors on your house. We find them unattractive for that very reason.

    Being true to his sardonic nature, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant vines.” It’s a clever line, but vines can serve a greater purpose for architects than simply camouflaging errors. They can be useful elements that can be integrated into the architecture. Here is an example of vines used to soften the visual impact of three, blank garage doors in an otherwise featureless portion of a house.

Pergola with Vines above Garage Doors

    It’s almost impossible to discuss composition and architectural proportion without referring to the golden mean, also called the golden section. Readers of Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code may recall the description of that formula in the book. As a brief refresher, the golden mean is the original organizing and proportioning method or formula for art and architecture. Its theory tells us that human beings are most pleased when things are in a proportion of 1 to 1.618. In other words, if a window is one unit wide, it should be 1.618 units tall in order to be the most appealing to human eyes. The golden mean was used prominently in Greek and Roman architecture and is just as useful in today’s world. Indeed, the same ratio that was applied to the design of the Parthenon is likely to aid your architect in the design of your new home.

    The golden mean offers a comfortable proportion with which to work, but it’s not the only comfortable proportion, so you don’t have to feel locked into it. The intriguing thing about the golden mean, about placing things at this scale, is that it just about always works. Consider it a safety net for proportions.

     A bit of architectural trivia: A classic and pervasive curved shape used to this day in crown moldings, wood trims, and other architectural details is the “ogee” curve. The “ogee” is a direct derivative of the golden mean. This curve originates with the Greeks and shows up in the columns we place on our front porches, crown moldings we place in our living rooms, and even the curves that are shaped into the aluminum gutters outside our houses. Who knew that ancient Greek classical design would eventually create aluminum gutters?

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    When designing your home, it is nearly impossible to make a reasonable judgment about colors of materials for your new house by simply looking at tiny color chips or samples. They will fool your eye every time.

    If you don’t believe me, try this little test. Go to the paint store, or your local Home Depot, and pick up a few color chips of paint. Be sure to get two of each color. When you get home, cut out the colors so that no white edges show. All you should have left is is small piece of paper with the color on it. Then place one of the chips on a white piece of paper and the other chip on some other color paper. Stand back and look at them. Do the colors look the same? I’ll bet they don’t.

    Color is influenced by its context. If you try to make your color selections standing in the paint store and you only look at the color as it’s shown on the sample card, which likely will have a white background, you may miss the subtle hues, only to notice them later when the entire house is painted and changing the color will cost you plenty.

    And speaking of hues, there is really no such thing as white. There are many colors of white. I know that sounds silly. After all, white is a color we can all identify. But actually there are many whites, each with its own unique underlying tone. A true white would be something along the lines of “copy paper” white, but even that may have a bluish cast when held up against a white with an underlying hint of yellow. There are “pinkish” whites, “greyish” whites, very, very pale yellows, and many more.

    You will have trouble seeing these nuances in a tiny paint chip. It is necessary to paint a larger sample wall to really see what subtle hues each white contains. So buy a can of the white you are considering and paint it on a wall. Let the paint dry before evaluating it and look at it on a sunny day, a cloudy day, and under artificial light. Chances are it will appear somewhat different in each condition.

    Most paint manufacturers group their paints in a way that will give you clues as to which “white” will go with which wall color. Let’s suppose you selected a Sherwin Williams color for the siding of your new house and it was “SW 6003, Proper Gray.” Then you were looking for the right white for the trim. How would you know which of the twenty-some whites they offer would go best with your siding color? In this case, you should select “SW 6000, Snowfall.” That’s because it is in the same color family as the siding color you already selected. In fact, all of the colors from SW 6000 through SW 6006, Black Bean, are in the same family. They all contain the same colors, but in varying intensities. So you can be certain they will go together. Another white, like SW 6049 Gorgeous White, might look just fine in a small sample. But when the trim was painted, it’s underlying brownish hue would show through and it would clash with the cooler gray of your SW 6003 siding.

    Dark colors can be just as tricky. Suppose you wanted a dark Green or a dark Burgundy for your shutters. You might be inclined to pick a color that looks nice and dark in the small chip. But I’ll warn you that when your shutters are painted and you stand back from them, your dark green will mysteriously morph into Kelly Green and your very ark Burgundy will look a lot more like a Red Zinfandel. Dark colors will look lighter in larger areas and when placed on darker backgrounds. So to get the truly dark Green or Burgundy, select one that looks nearly black in the paint chip. Then, paint out a larger area just to be sure.

    For the cost of a few cans of paint, you can avoid the costly mistake of having to repaint your entire house after the color gremlins change what you thought picked into something you never intended.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    In a high-end community where I have designed nearly one hundred houses, there are fairly strict house design guidelines. Covenants and restrictions are a necessary element in maintaining a level of quality, and thus, maintaining property values. No one is happy if a lime green house ends up next door. Design restrictions offer some limits, and as Martha Stewart says, that is a good thing.

    But some restrictions can go too far. One rule this community has is that every house must have a clearly displayed house number. That, in and of itself, is fine. Emergency vehicles need to be able to find the correct house, so I have no objection to that. But our Architectural Review Board has gone further and determined that only one style of house number is permitted. It is a bronze, somewhat traditional plaque with only one available font for the numerals.

    My objection has always been that the style of the house numbers should be compatible with the style of the house. A contemporary house would look odd with colonial numbers and vice versa. Today, the Chicago Tribune has an article on exactly this issue. It’s entitled Your house, by the numbers and was written by Mary G. Pepitone.

    I could not have expressed it better myself.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    By now, we are all familiar with the term, McMansion. Last year, work took me to Sedona, Arizona. While there, my clients escorted my wife and I on a tour of the local sights. Sedona is wonderfully beautiful. It is home of some of the most spectacular rock formations in the world. Many movies have been shot there and the existentialists gather frequently to experience the vortexes. I have to admit to a large amount of skepticism on those vortexes. Or is it vortecii? It’s been long time since high school Latin.

    One of our stops on the tour was the Chapel of the Holy Cross

Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona, Arizona

     You can see how this interesting piece of architecture is designed to be integral to the rocks. It’s simplicity of form is inspiring. The architecture is minimal making its impact grand.

    But when you stand next to the Chapel of the Holy Cross and look out to the distant rock formations, this is what you see.

A McMansion in Sedona, Arizona

    Yes, it is the poster child for McMansions. Were they trying to mimic the rock formation? I just find this to be inexplicable. By the way, the dome in the center is an observatory that opens to let you view the night sky. But I might be wrong on that. It could actually be a vortex catcher!

    I’ll file this one away in the “more dollars than sense” department.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com