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

    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

    Here is the answer to yesterday’s Dream House Fumble question. I asked if you saw what was wrong with the brickwork. Here’s the photo, again, just to refresh your memory.

Dream House Fumble #3

    Does the brick look “glued on” to you? It does to me. Brick is a heavy, solid material that is the actual structure of thousands and thousands of buildings that date back to the Romans. It is a material that should express its strength and it should not be used as a “detail” material or a wall facing, like vinyl siding.

    In this house, the item that really caught my eye and drove me to snap this picture and show it to you is the “key”, or “keystone” at the top of the half-round. A key is the wedge shaped block at the 12:00 o’clock position. Originally, in masonry arches, the key was the last stone set. It secured the arch structurally, making it capable of supporting considerable loads across an open span. In classic detailing, the key in an arch often was mimicked when the arch was built of wood. It retained it’s psychological quality of “locking” the structure together.

    In our example here, the arch is made of brick, the key is made of wood, and there is no key at all in the brickwork! The brick absolutely denies its structural properties. If it were structural, it would collapse. As a result, the brick appears as simply an applied material that serves as mere siding. The entire look is visually abrasive and dissonant. This window would have been much more successful if the wooden key had been omitted and a brick or cast stone key had been installed in the brickwork.

    While we’re at it, I could point out other strange details, like the excessive width of the window trim and the awful half-round fan detail above the center window. I suppose that was put there to replace a more expensive true fan window. A real window would have made a great difference for only a couple of hundred dollars. Wouldn’t it be worth it right on the front of the house? I will give them credit for placing the downspouts around the corner and not running them right on top of the brick quoins. Ironically, the quoins are costly and enhance the expression of strength in the masonry. Better to have ditched the quoins and done the window and arch properly.

   You may think this is a little picky. But this is what separates a good house from a marginal house. The details make the difference.

    I have been engaged in a discussion on an on-line forum of residential architects in which we are debating what good design is and what our profession should do about it. It has been my contention that we have negatively influenced public opinion about architects be creating an elitist image of ourselves. I would like to see this change. I would like to see more architects designing more houses and becoming a positive influence on good house design.

    Here’s what I posted today. I thought you might be interested.

   ”I have no problem with modern design done well. It is not about a style preference. It is about who we are as a profession.

    I like modern design. I’ve designed, built, and lived in two of my own. And I’ve designed many others for my clients. But I don’t think that much of what wins awards (Residential Architect magazine) and is therefore held out to the public as the “best of our profession’s work” is very good, at all. Because of that, our mission of improving residential design is crippled by this negative public opinion that we are creating. We are praising a very narrow sliver of residential architecture that is appealling to a very narrow sliver of the population. And in many cases, the leaders of the profession come across as disparaging anything that comes closer to matching the public’s image of “home.” Couldn’t we at least find good examples of modern architecture? What we feature doesn’t even have furniture in it, for goodness sake. It’s often merely a metal and glass museum box with a Barcelona chair. Where are the people supposed to go?

    So my point is that by doing this, we are actively alienating the public, except for a very small segment, and our opinions about what good design is are losing credibility. All of this hurts us in the marketplace. It distresses me that we remove ourselves from the game and then complain about how the game is being played. Wouldn’t it be better if we embraced all styles, regained a voice (not just a voice to the elite) and then spoke out to make a difference?

    What is truly disturbing are the reactions that come from within the profession. If you dare accept that anything even a little bit traditional might be “good design,” then the cognoscenti will ostracize you as a heathen who can’t comprehend the intellectual superiority of modern. I find the modernists to be unyielding and, frankly, close-minded. Shouldn’t the profession be more multi-cultural? Shouldn’t we have a bigger tent?

    So although this may sound like an endorsement of traditional, it isn’t. It is an endorsement of all styles and a call to the profession to open its arms and embrace all styles. Let’s not continue to marginalize ourselves. If we do, good design will be the loser.”

    I would love to hear your comments on this topic.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    Sub-Zero, Liebherr, GE Monogram, and other “cabinet depth,” built-in refrigerators are increasingly popular in the high-end market. These refrigerators provide a number of desirable features, such as humidity controlled compartments, specially controlled drawers for fine-tuning the temperature for delicate foods, snack drawers, and independent compressors for the freezer and the refrigerator so that there is no shared air between the two chambers. However, I think the greatest appeal is the fact that these refrigerators are the same depth as the lower kitchen cabinets.

    Ordinary refrigerators are six or eight inches deeper than the lower cabinets and countertop causing them to stick out into the room, thus ruining the lines of the kitchen design and just plain getting in the way. A built-in type unit will sit back more, with its doors flush with the other cabinets so they become less obtrusive. Each manufacturer offers several models that have doors you can cover with panels that match your other cabinetry. This is what you see in showplace kitchens.

    But there is one little potential pitfall you need to be aware of. The refrigerator manufacturers offer only a limited selection of handles for the doors. Chances are, the style and the finish of these door handles will not match or be compatible with your cabinet door handles. You might not like that look. 

   The solution is not as simple as merely putting the same cabinet door handles on the refrigerator and freezer as you have on the other cabinets. I’ve seen this done and it ends up looking rather silly. Cabinet door handles are much too small to look like the right thing to be pulling hard on to open the large doors of a refrigerator or freezer.  

    Here’s what you need to do. Make sure your cabinet handle selection has compatible, but larger, handles for your paneled refrigerator front before you finalize your cabinet door hardware choice. These are more and more available. I guess the hardware manufacturers are recognizing the problem.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    When you mention wood floors to most people, they conjure up an image of a narrow board, red oak floor. But times have changed. Now there are many, many choices of board width and species. And many of these choices come at a modest cost increase. I’ve used white oak, antique chestnut oak, antique heart pine, santos mahogany, jatoba (aka Brazilian cherry), Australian cypress, cumaru, lyptus, and other species you may not have ever heard of. The range of color choices and grain patterns is impressive.

    Each species will look different depending on how it is cut. Most are available as “plain sawn.” Many are also available as quarter-sawn and rift-sawn. The different cut makes the grain of the wood show differently. Many of these species are considerably harder than red oak and therefore they will last much longer and resist indentations. So explore your options before settling on the good old standard of red oak.

    Wood is a renewable resource. Don’t be worried about the sustainability issue with wood floors if you are buying from a source that only deals with managed plantations or reclaimed wood.  I work with a good company here in North Carolina called Select Forest Products. Here’s what they say about sustainability on their website. Some of these facts may defy the common perception of wood use.

Sustainability
Select Forest Products is committed to new growth, plantation-grown imported woods, and salvaged, reclaimed woods only. We will not sell any rainforest or tropical woods which are not grown exclusively for the purpose of commercial lumbering uses, worldwide. There’s alot of misinformation out there about the actual status of new growth forests, and we’d like to point out a few facts for our customers:

• The United States and Canada grow about twice as much hardwood as they harvest annually.
• Wood is a natural resource, renewable and recyclable.
• Buildings, barns, ships and other structures made of wood often find a second life in wood flooring, cabinets, walls and ceilings.
• In the early 1600s, forests covered about one-half of the area of what is now the continental United States. More than a billion acres of land was forested when the pilgrims arrived. Today, even with all the clearing for development, with all the tree harvesting, with all the wood products we have consumed in 350 years, we still have more than 753 million acres in forests, nearly three-quarters as much as when the first settlers arrived.
• Last year, more than 2.3 billion seedlings were planted in the United States by the forestry community. That’s more than nine new trees for every man, woman and child in America.
• Leading allergists agree that wood floors are the perfect choice for a healthy home.
• Foresters sustain habitats that teem with wildlife, contribute to clean air and water, provide recreational opportunities and supply products that find new life in the home.

Use wood from good sources and sleep with a good conscience.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

Where has house design gone these days?

I was driving through a very nice neighborhood yesterday and I was struck by the number of houses that seemed so amatuerishly put together. It was almost as if someone worked at making them ugly. I could not help but wonder why this is. Who designs these houses? The answer is probably no one. Sadly, the majority of houses built in the United States are built from plans a builder has used and modified over and over, or from purchased plans that someone selected because they have the right kind of rooms the owners wanted or they fit onto the piece of property. Maybe the owners even sort of like the appearance.

Okay. I understand that not every house can be great. But do they have to be sooooo ugly. Good house design is not rocket science. It’s a matter of thinking about what you’re doing. It’s a matter of stepping back once in a while and looking at the larger picture. Just because all of the rooms fit together, a house isn’t necessarily good and your design isn’t necessarily finished. What can we do to help?

This is the official launch of a new feature for this blog I’ll call, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” when I find a house or a portion of a house I think is particularly odd, wrong, or just ugly, I’ll post it and ask you what you think is wrong with it. The next day, I’ll post what I think is wrong and you can see if you agree with me. But I won’t just criticize the examples. I’ll offer suggestions for improving it.

I invite you to submit photos of things you find ugly, aesthetically offensive, or just plain funny. I’ll be glad to comment on those, too.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com