Sensitive Design & Concept Development

Take a look at the stacks of house plan magazines and kits available at your local grocery store. It makes me shudder. Great intentions…but odds are not in anyone’s favour for crafting an inspiring and appropriate home.

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FULL ARTICLE

How can one design a home—including it’s aesthetics and construction methods—without consideration for its site, orientation and wider geographic location? I suppose one can, but the result would be a home lacking in harmony and constructed with inappropriate building materials (like adobe in a rain forest). And it’s a near guarantee the home would be awkwardly disconnected from its surrounding culture and environment. To design in this way sounds ridiculous and one is left wondering what fool would even bother dreaming up such a disaster. Yet, it happens every day. Take a look at the stacks of house plan magazines and kits available at your local grocery store. It makes me shudder. Great intentions…but odds are not in anyone’s favour for crafting an inspiring and appropriate home.

Home—as a haven of safety, beauty and family—has been close to my heart and on my mind since my early days of big thick red kindergarten HB pencils. Even before I could write I was designing houses. I remember parts of my own (very particular) process…

I began with imagining the site itself, the ‘yard’ as us farmkids called it. I always labelled the cardinal points, N, E, S, W, with north up, like a proper map. This was important because then I could track the sun’s movement throughout the day for that particular building site.  Kitchens were ideally southeast, dining rooms in the west for the sunset and bedrooms to the east. Of course, these locations depended upon my imagined vistas in the pretend yard and beyond. I can’t recall now if I consciously undertook this process each time, but upon reflecting, I see very clear patterns of design flow. At the same time as considering the sun’s traverse through the sky—which of course varied depending on the season—I made up an imaginary family who would live in this house. I created a mini-profile for each member. I named them all and knew their hobbies, professions, age and culture. Sometimes I’d even go so far as to cut out figures from the Eaton’s catalogue and create what we’d now refer to as a vision board. All this, just to draw up an amateur house plan on a faded sheet of graph paper I’d swiped from God knows where.

The point is, all that information, while seemingly tedious, was absolutely necessary to produce what today I’d call an Integral Blueprint.

As it turns out, this intuitively-based process I had been musing with is in fact a recognized architectural design process. And happily, it’s being put to work on this project.

The Spark of an Idea

All this ‘design process’ stuff came into sharp focus the moment Clive told me his vision for the next home Balandra would build. It was going to be different, it was going to be special. Now, don’t get me wrong, every single Balandra home has been built with love and attention. But when it sunk in that this next home would have an expanded raison d’etre, I was elated.

To begin with, it’s site is a rare find. The property is one of only 22 western waterfront lots like it in Richmond. Looking west, the eye sails across the sea until it focuses on the islands, nearly 40 kilometres away (this is design process note N^o 1). It’s in a quiet, established neighbourhood (note N^o 2) with mature trees (note N^o 3). Because of its proximity to the water it contains an ecologically sensitive area at the western property line (major design note N^o 4!). It neighbours Steveston village (note N^o 5), an historic fishing community which conjures up images of seaside shingled siding, driftwood and oceanic blues and greys… Already, the story of the home was beginning to come to life and yet not a single sketch had been made… Being in a family neighbourhood with good schools nearby we could envision a family with children moving in. Although, its location along the water would also draw mature couples with an appreciation for the finer things in life, who are likely well-traveled and eager to share their successful lifestyle with guests.

Key Considerations

And so it was, Balandra began the process of considering every facet in order to design the home. The process is an art—of culling the imagination and intuition—as much as it is a science—of analysing temperatures, sun angles, geography and the like. We see the key considerations of the design process as such:

• Site location, terrain
• Views and sightlines
• Light, path of sun
• Wider geographic locale and climate
• Surrounding culture and aesthetics
• Environmental sensitivities and features
• Family/home owners’ lifestyle
• …and the lasting impact of each of the above

These were the building blocks and as the information began to emerge so too did the home’s name. Every Balandra home is named after a coastal community and it seemed perfectly fitting that this home, with its extra attention should receive a name with a little more personality. After researching coastal towns and wildlife from around the globe, Balandra’s interior designer, Maxine, arrived at the perfect name: Dunlin Shore.The name is inspired by a petite coastal species of our feathered friends, the Dunlin shore bird, common to the shores of North America.

Bringing the Blueprint to Life

Next, the building plan designer, Binder Gill of Glenwood Homes, got to work drafting up the first version of the home’s blueprints. After rounds of conversations, scribbles on napkins and always referring back to our key considerations, the final plan was rendered.  {See the plans here}

Site Sensitivities & Risks

Dunlin Shore’s unique location brought with it a number of excellent bonuses, like the seascape view, but also some considerable risks.  The site lies partially within an ecologically sensitive zone known as a riparian management area and borders an important waterway teeming with life. While the City of Richmond outlays regulations which must be followed—and we obliged—we felt it was appropriate to take further measures to protect life—both eco and biological.  This lead to the installation of a silt protection barrier to prevent site material from seeping into the waterway (not required, but it just felt right). And because Dunlin Shore is a SmartHome, its geothermal heating and cooling comes from deep within the earth, thus requiring careful planning and execution of multiple 200-foot-deep bore holes.  Jeremy Jacob of Exchangenergy took good care of this for us. Now that their drilling is complete there’s virtually no evidence of their heavy machinery—a testament to a job well-done and no doubt appreciated by the nearby creatures and plants.

Onward & Upward

In the coming chapters of our Birth of a Balandra Home chronicle I will explore more on each of our key considerations and how they’ve been addressed, like the home’s eco-sensitive landscaping, it’s design concept and development and all the areas we’re going above and beyond in greening and making this a very ‘smart’ home indeed.  We’ll witness the art and science of the design and construction process unfolding as it happens.

I invite you to journey with us as we continue to bring Balandra’s Dunlin Shore home to life…

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