So, now we had bought the land, but it was somewhat backwards from what we had been looking for, at least in terms of driveway direction and the direction towards the best view.  We needed to roughly site the home on the property and make any internal layout adjustment that arose from that.

One rough site plan showing access from the road. We tried several versions of this, including one that separated the garage into two parts, but they all had some key flaws.  The yellow box is roughly the flat area at the top of the hill.

Our property did have a road to the north, actually the road wraps around the north and west of our lot.  I called the county about getting a driveway permit and was able to get agreement that there is a point on the north side with enough sight line distance (for safety, they want 300 feet of view up and down the road from the driveway exit, which is tricky on a curvy road like that) to qualify for a driveway permit.  I also checked with the neighborhood association and they didn’t mind if my driveway came off the road instead of the circle.

However, the best spot to site the home is the flat spot on the top of the hill on the south side of the lot.  A driveway stretching from the acceptable driveway location on the north side would be longer, steeper and curvier, and would therefore need a driveway circle so guests could easily leave (an important design consideration ;))    It would also cost much more to put in and maintain the longer driveway.  Also, thinking passive solar, a driveway on the north side of a house does not have the benefit of winter sunshine to help melt away the snow.  Our particular lot has prevailing winds from the south west; the house would shield the driveway from these winds, and possibly even sweep snow off the roof and onto the driveway.  I really do not like shoveling snow ;).   But the biggest kicker is that our back yard would be on the south side of the house, which, on this lot, is too sunny with no shade and is overlooked by our nearest neighbor.   We enjoy our backyard BBQs all summer and this wouldn’t work for us.

Rough site plan showing driveway from the south, and associated benefits.  The yellow box is roughly the flat “build-able” area at the top of the hill.

On the other hand, if we accepted the fact that things were different than we planned, and swapped the driveway around to the south side of the house, we had a lot of advantages.  The shorter, straighter, flatter, simpler drive way would be easier and cheaper to build and maintain.  The winter sun and wind would help clear the snow.  The back yard would be more private and reserved for plants and play.  Our summer BBQs would be sheltered from the wind and sun.

One problem with this design is that we would need to face the garage somewhat towards the road which may cause friction with the neighborhood association; I was at least able to angle it a little so it wouldn’t face the actual circle (not shown in this rough site plan, but corrected later).  Maybe we could also use trees along the leeward side (East side) of the driveway to hide the garage?

The big problem with switching to the southern driveway was that it required so much change in the house layout.  The front door would need to move from the north side to the south-west corner and this changed a lot of what happened in between.  It shifted the guest suite, my office, the kitchen and dining room, which changed the actual structure of the house.  The main non-structural purpose of the “rotunda” room at the center of the house was a traffic spine from the entry…  That doesn’t work if there is no entry connected to it.  We kicked around a few ideas to try and wrap the driveway from the south side around to the entry cottage on the north side, but none of that worked.   After spending so long to get to that point in the layout, changing it seemed overwhelming and I just didn’t do anything for 4 months (except focus on my MBA, which is a lot of work and not recommended to be done in conjunction with home design or construction).

Anyway, fast forward to this past January 2012.  I took a semester off my MBA and focused on resolving the layout issues and other engineering difficulties…

The start of the room shift… I like how I dumped the chairs on the lawn and the kitchen appliances are in the garage…

The first thing we did was move the entry into the south west pod where the dining room had been.  This meant we had to shift the dining room clockwise into where the kitchen had been and shift the kitchen around to where the mud room, pantry and office had been…  We also took the guest room (previously on the north side of the house as part of the entry cottage) and shoehorned it into the remaining part of the circle, just past the kitchen…  The guest bath ended up on the north side of the rotunda…   Sounds easy… but none of it fit well…  And now I had no office or pantry.

We messed around trying different things for weeks until I ended up increasing the radius of the dining room and kitchen.  This gave us room around the dining room table and let the table be enough out of the way to get from the kitchen to the other rooms.  It also solved the problem of access to the back yard from the kitchen.  Technically, the guest room was in the way, but the relatively larger radius for the kitchen meant we could pass thru the mud room to the north side of the house.   However, this radius increase started the cycle of increasing the square footage again…  We would need to keep an eye on that this time.

We also discovered that the building code used in Michigan would not allow the tight spiral stair I planned to put in the rotunda.  I had got the narrower dimensions from “The Iron Shop” which has advertised in every Popular Science magazine I got for years…  I guess they also provide smaller spirals for people who are not so concerned about building codes.   The larger “min” size specified by the code would not allow much traffic flow in the rotunda, so I decided to move that off to the west (outside the rotunda, behind the wall behind piano), and use up the tight end of the kitchen (where I had briefly placed the pantry, so that was bumped again).  It still didn’t fit well because the storm room only had a 10ft radius, so I am hoping we figure something out there later.

I really needed an office.   I considered putting it in the guest room and just moving out when we had guests, which is what I do now.  We might end up doing that as a cost cutting measure later on, but for now, I decided to plan for a dedicated office.   Unlike most people who want their home office in a remote corner of the house, I like keeping in touch with what is going on;  as long as I can close the door when I need to.   I also like having a window that lets me see who is coming and going from the house.  This lead me to place an apse outside the dining room wall.  Structurally, this would make it easier (and perhaps cheaper) to fill the area outside the dining room wall.  My earlier dining room design had a lot more windows, but that evening light and heat can be annoying, and it was making it a lot harder to earth cover that side of the house.  The new design just has a high chord window tucked into the end of the vault.  For a door, I decided I wanted to use a sliding bookshelf, like a “well-known-secret” door.  My earth sheltered office would have a little window overlooking the driveway and the path to the front door.

Next issue… the guest quarters… interestingly and coincidentally, this took up about a “quarter” of the circle.  We sometimes have multiple guests at a time, or at least parents and their children, so we decided to have two rooms.  They needed to be near and attached to the guest bath that would also serve the main “entertaining” area of the house.  initially, we also wanted the guests to be able to come and go without going thru the main areas of the house and thought it would be good to have a hall from the mud-room to the rotunda.  Now, how to shuffle it to fit nicely?  Try as I might, I just couldn’t make it all fit.  In some cases, I also tried to fit a curved stair around the outside of the rotunda.    We tried a bunch of different combinations, each time we would try fitting a queen size bed in the room and fixtures in the bath room and then imagine using the space (never mind figuring out the roof structure).

We tried a variety of guest quarter layouts. Early versions included a hall from the mud room the the rotunda that was later dropped from the requirements. We couldn’t make it work until we added 2 feet to the radius… Is that the easy way out?

At about this point, I was also researching soil properties and discovered that my particular sandy loam soil had a lateral loading of less than half of clay…  In practical terms, this meant that I could have a basement (and not worry that it needed to be super strong to support the earth forces)… I thought that might be handy under the northern 2/3rds of the circle, but this added a stair requirement, and the stairs should probably connect to the mud room attached to the garage…   This put an additional squeeze on the guest room and killed the hallway idea.

As with many great ideas, the winning idea came to me in the shower one morning…  The radius was just too tight, if I could increase the radius by two feet, I could get a good solution.   This would have a bathroom with a door to one of the rooms.  The other room would act as the guest living room, but could also include sleeping sofas if necessary.  I even thought I could put a large format picture on the wall that could fold out into a bunk…  Lets see if that ever materializes.

Quonset Huts are strong, easy to assemble and very affordable, steel buildings.

The next step was figuring out the roof structure, including the eyebrows, reinforcement, etc., which I will eventually discuss in a TECH Notes post.  I also had basement egress to worry about (extra tricky in an earth sheltered home).  I got some good ideas for that from a Malcolm Wells book (an underground Frank Llyod Wright).  At some point, I don’t remember when, I changed the garage structure to a cement and earth covered Quonset hut…  These steel forms are cheap (30’x40′ garage for $7K) and strong and take all the risk out of shotcrete.  We briefly considered scrapping the previous design and going with a series of these Quonset huts, but we decided we were not that “modern”.   Now we may end up changing from a Q-type Quonset hut to an S-type which has more head room for the garage doors.

By April 2012, I had pushed the limit of what I could get out of Revit…  Making the complex roof structure might have been possible, but not without committing more time to develop skills, and then a lot of evenings to get the work done.  We also knew that we faced an upcoming approval gauntlet with both our lender and our neighborhood association.  We decided to hire a proper architect to help us finish the work…  We also needed an engineer to approve the structural plans.  Going with these professionals would cost us some money, but would smooth the whole process from there…  Heck, they may even be able to improve the layout or other ideas of the house.  More on that stage later.  In the mean time, here is a gallery of my sketches and 3D models…

The other day I was headed down I75 thru Ohio on some business trip and off to the west I saw an abandoned building that looked totally covered in very thick trees.  I wish I had stopped to take a photo.  It turned out to be an abandoned Carrabba’s restaurant.   I had seen this chain of restaurants before, but this one was so overgrown it really looked like a fully earth sheltered building.

Article explaining how it was done, click to read

I just did a little research and discovered that this was first done in Orlando Florida back in 1998…  You really need to be interesting to stand out in Orlando, so the owners wanted the restaurant to remind patrons of the hills of Tuscany…  They hired Architect James Wines, famous for incorporating landscaping into architecture, to figure it out for them.  He created a large 1700 sqft “L” shaped planter design capable of supporting all the weight required, including 180,000 lbs of light weight soil, 12ft above the patio.  It has ingenious design features such as drainage down thru the columns, a drip watering system and even boulders made of cellular concrete (aircrete).  Since then, every Carrabba’s restaurant has followed this design, and 70 older restaurants were “greened”.  There are now well over 100 green roofed Carribba’s restaurants in the USA and Canada, and I found that some even hold special “roof park picnics” on the roof from time to time.  The large planter added about $50,000 to the cost of each restaurant.  Due to the cost, Carrabba’s has stopped requiring the roof top gardens on its restaurants since 2006.

Gardeners are needed on the roof about 4 times a year

While they are going for a Tuscan look, and all the restaurants include Italian cypress trees, they are also planted with low-maintenance indigenous plants (such as palm trees Texas or Florida, or pines in Boston or Salt Lake).   Lessons learned include cutting out aggressive plants such as bougainvillea that required more maintenance to keep them from overpowering the other plants.  Carribba’s is looking for a natural look, so gardeners only go up on the roof 4 times a year.  The gardens must be very robust because even the abandoned restaurant I saw was doing very well all on its own.

Small birds, butterflies and even geese are a common sight on many of Carrabba’s rooftops.  It is as if they found a small oasis in the desert of parking lots.