Overcoming OBSTACLES
A Connecticut home prevails over renovation challenges to gain charming farmhouse style.
Sometimes, building challenges are another opportunity to get more creative. When architect Michael LOBUGLIO of Michael LOBUGLIO Architects came in to help a family renovate their farmhouse, they had a design challenge from the start: The house was located in a floodplain.
PLAIN GOOD QUALITY
“What we wanted to do was add onto the house but keep the same height of the first floor,” Michael says. Because of the floodplain, the house was situated to maximize its chances of surviving a large storm. In order to get permission from the city to complete any renovations, Michael and his team had to prove that the renovations wouldn’t affect the current elevation of the structure. “I had to do a series of drawings that showed we were keeping a lot of the same walls on the plan,” he says. “We also kept the existing foundation.”
FARMHOUSE DESIGN
Because there were so many restrictions on the type of changes Michael could make, he had to get creative with the design elements. “It’s not symmetrical,” he says. The turret on the left of the building rises higher than the right side of the home, but he was able to make it work on the existing foundation, and added beautiful architectural features in the middle of the home to draw the eye. These include a covered porch, gambrel-style roofline and cupola. He added unusually-shaped windows, too, from the eyebrow window to the small round windows that resemble nautical portholes. The result is a refreshing farmhouse-style home that’s also flood-resistant.
What’s a gambrel? It’s a roofline with two different slopes: a steeper slope beneath a shallower slope. “Gambrel form is in a lot of barn
styles,” Michael says.