HOME ON THE RANGE
Buyers choose smaller houses to open up more outdoor space
The “Contemporary Farmhouse” constructed in a subdivision outside Las Vegas in what once had been a desert, is a modest-sized dwelling that lives big and throws convention out the window.
This very different house offers unusually large outdoor living areas and a smaller footprint that covers only about half the lot. In the future, it could become a model for how new homes are built.
Buyers here are increasingly choosing smaller houses to open up more area outdoors that can be turned into “outdoor rooms.” To get them, they are willing to jettison bonus rooms and large game rooms that once were highly desirable but have fallen out of favour, said Klif Andrews, division president for Nevada-based Pardee Homes, which built the experimental dwelling for the International Builders Show.
“In essence, buyers are trading space inside the house for space that’s outside,” he said.
This paradigm shift began about five years ago with the end of the recession and the introduction of a new generation of affordable, three-panel, stacking glass doors that are 12 to 15 feet wide, Andrews said. These were a “game changer,” he said, compared with the standard eight-foot-wide sliders, because the glass area in an outside wall could be much bigger, the opening is much larger when the doors are pulled back and the tracks in the floor below the doors are so minimal that they are barely noticeable.
As the line between interior and exterior areas became less distinct, it was only a matter of time before homeowners began to spend more time out there, Andrews said.
Indoor-outdoor relationships are a central theme in the Contemporary Farmhouse, but the first thing to catch a visitor’s eye is the exterior, an unusual marriage of rural and urban vernacular traditions.
The simple single-gable shape of the second floor of the two-storey Contemporary Farmhouse recalls the modest two-storey, woodframe houses that were built across rural and urban America from the 1890s to the 1930s, while the wide expanse of adobe-coloured stone on the first floor is reminiscent of the simple, one-storey houses that were built by working ranchers in the Southwest.
And, surely a first for a production home builder, the lintels over the door and window openings, as well as the retaining walls for the landscaping, are made of Cor-Ten steel, a material more commonly found in bridges and highway overpasses because its protective, rustcoloured coating resists real rust.
While this atypical mix suggests that something unusual is afoot, the design celebrates what is inside as much as what is outside.
The main indoor living area of the 2,100-square-foot house is Lshaped, with a living and dining area in each leg and the kitchen centrally located where the two legs meet.
Four of the five outside walls that overlook three private outdoor areas appear to be entirely made of glass, because the outsized stacking glass doors in each wall are 12 feet wide and eight feet high. Two sets of the stacking glass doors in the living and dining areas intersect. When each one is pulled all the way back, there is no corner post or anything else to indicate the presence of a wall — the space is completely open to the outside.
The outdoor areas are neither garden nor lawn; they are furnished outdoor rooms, similar in size to the adjacent indoor spaces, paved with the same floor tile and enclosed on the far side by the fivefoot-high, adobe-coloured stone wall that surrounds the property.
Two of the outdoor areas are covered, including one on the front of the house that the architect characterized as a “reverse-facing porch” because it faces the patio, rather than facing the street.
The walls of glass and the outdoor rooms will beguile most visitors, but the scale of the interior living areas is equally important in creating the overall effect — a space that feels both expansive and intimate at the same time. The large openings for the stacking glass doors create the impression that the living and dining areas are quite large; in fact, they are 12 by 15 feet, a modest size that lends itself to intimate conversation and does not require oversized furniture to look right.