Gardner Architects LLC

harker's point

canal house

The Intracoastal Waterway runs along the east coast of the United States, connecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and comprising many kinds of waterways.  This project sits on one of those waterways – the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal – in a coastal maritime forest with sandy dunes, and facing grassy marshes and perennial wetlands. 

The design agenda called for a sensitive response to climate and site. The house is sited to maximize views to the canal and wetlands, while providing a variety of protected and shaded exterior spaces. The form of the house is split by a glazed entry foyer, offering views along a continuous boardwalk from the streetside through the foyer to the canal and marsh.   

Creating a shaded place, saving all the trees on site, capturing yet sheltering from sun and breeze, maximizing views, creating habitat – these are some of the project strategies we employed to decrease energy demand and enhance building-site synergies.  The project focuses on passive and active sustainable strategies in order to address these goals. By creating a strategically shaded, highly insulated and vapor-managed building envelope, employing ground source heat and cooling, and an energy recovery ventilator, energy costs are reduced and comfort is enhanced. Carefully positioned operable windows and skylights, including in the open, gabled stairway, allow for natural ventilation and take advantage of the stack effect.  The strategic location of shading devices – exterior solar shades and a trellis – rounds out the suite of passive approaches.  

The home is a home for the beach, not a suburban home transplanted to the beach.  The design recalls the traditions of the cabins that used to comprise this community.  The heart of the home is where the towels are! Spaces for circulation, gathering, and chance encounters of the extended family and friends who gather and hang about the inside and outsides spaces.   The kitchen bridges the interior and exterior, linking a porch with the living and dining areas.   Materials are matter of fact, rough-hewn, utilitarian.  A home for the grill, kayaks, laundry, outdoor showers, and beach storage were as important as spaces for sleeping, eating, and gathering.

Project Team
1200AE Architectural Engineers PLLC 
Beachwood Inc.
Jennifer Gilmer Kitchen and Bath Ltd
John Hynes & Associates
Jordan Honeyman Landscape Architects 

flint hill

The house is a porch overlooking the mountains.  

Located in Virginia’s northern Piedmont, Rappahannock County descends from the Blue Ridge south to the rolling hills of Culpeper and Madison. The county retains its agricultural and rural origins and is home to an International Dark-Sky Park, one of the last places on the East Coast with views of the Milky Way. Flint Hill, the project site, inherits Rappahannock’s undulating foothills, clear skies, and sprawling vistas.

The client’s agenda: a sustainably-minded home-away-from-home, with living and sleeping wings, vegetable and flower gardens, a year-round pool, a bocce court, and a carport, located strategically within the sixty-four acre site. The house borrows forms from local farm outbuildings, such as grain storage sheds. Oriented to capture light and breeze, the home’s two wings follow the topography and share views of the adjacent meadows and distant mountains. Connections between the home’s interior and exterior spaces allow easy movement and continuous engagement with the site.

Design for Integration, Wellbeing, and Discovery

Flint Hill embraces the site, the design integrating the house with the site’s ridge, forming a natural threshold to the “bowl” and an existing rubble stone wall. Layers step up from the approach and then down to the meadow below, engaging the north-south layers of the house precinct.

● Encouraging an active lifestyle, the house enables a daily ritual that begins and ends in the garden, with excursions for hiking, bird-watching, and regular maintenance of the grounds.
● The house is a home base, supporting the client’s program of conservation and restoration of habitat across the broader site.
● The design expresses the client’s goals for a sustainable home, with strategies for capturing daylight and natural prevailing wind, the benefits of passive solar and a high-performance building envelope, water-efficient irrigation systems using on-site sources, solar PV systems, and electric lighting managed along Dark Sky best practices.

Design for Economy

The house is designed to be economical to build and maintain, through the use of simple, efficient forms and materials, such as open-sided rectangular forms with mono-pitch shed roofs that echo the local farm culture.

● The house is right-sized to meet the needs of the client, but accommodates the client’s frequent needs, such as family gatherings and visiting guests, through the use of flexible spaces, configurable to the day’s demands. 
● The house elements support multiple purposes. The terrace roof overhang, for example, incorporates built-in exterior motorized shades, providing shelter in the summer while allowing the benefit of the low winter sun.
● Solar panels to reduce operating costs, helping to make the house more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

Design for Ecosystems, Water, Energy, Resources, and Change

● Though oriented primarily to the west, the design achieves a HERS rating of 21, through a vapor- managed high performing envelope, high-efficiency windows and doors, balanced ventilation with an ERV, a heat-pump water heater, an 8kW photovoltaic system, motorized shading, energy-star appliances and a right-sized mechanical system.
● Capitalizing on interconnectedness, the design provides comfort outside bounds of the ASHRAE psychometric chart by controlling humidity, low-to-high cross-ventilation from the terrace/meadow to the clerestory windows, and motorized exterior roller shading. Passive strategies, such as capturing low afternoon winter sun with tiled floor mass, further motivate the design.
● A deep-roofed terrace-porch, creating an outdoor room and a protective layer to the living spaces within, allows for a sustainable and resilient design that preserves the views and conforms to the site topography.
● The formal language of the house serves both the ideals of sustainability and connection with nature and the landscape. 
. 
Team - Design:
Gardner Architects LLC (Architect)
Gregg Bleam Landscape Architects (Landscape Architecture)
MCC 1200AE Architectural Engineers (Structural Engineering)
Energy Services Group (Energy Modeling)
Jennifer Gilmer Kitchen & Bath (Kitchen Design)
Illuminations (Lighting) 
Josh Catlett Engineering (Mechanical Engineering)
Dice Engineering (Civil Engineering) 
ECS (Geotechnical Engineering)
.
Team - Subcontractors of Note: 
JW Townsend (Landscape Installation) 
Alpine Pools (Pool Installation)
Advanced Concrete (Site Walls)
Virginia Cast Stone (Site Walls and Hardscape)
.
Photography:
Scouting photos - John Cole Photo
Landscape and evening porch photos - Emily Hagen Photography
Miscellaneous photos - Amy Gardner

treehouse

Residential building fabric is all too often razed in order to create new residential structures that maximize the zoning envelope, to the detriment of the neighborhood fabric and scale. 

By contrast the design approach for this project integrates analysis of typical characteristics of construction vis-a-vis the era of construction, building-site relationships, and sustainable strategies in order to join competing interests, save the building and preserve its role in the community. 

This house, built in the 1960s, faces south on a wooded lot in Bethesda, Mary- land. The house had limited and lifeless connections to its site, and a dearth of habitable spaces that adjoined the landscape.  

With excessive energy consumption, poor construction characteristic of its era compounded by considerable deterioration as the baseline condition in which we found the home, the house then suffered a major blow--burst pipes rendered the house uninhabitable. This last event prompted the owners to either raze or resuscitate their home. 

We implemented passive approaches for daylight and ventilation, a new vapor-managed building envelope, a state-of-the art insulation strategy, and updated high-efficiency mechanical systems.  

We stewarded the development of a masterplan that manages stormwater, creates habitat for indigenous species, and selectively embraces trees thereby preserving the quality of the community. Our strategy saved the existing building, preserve the site and the existing trees contributed to the preservation of the neighborhood history. 

The renovated home includes 25% increased fenestration with glazing type and area tuned towards exposure, and a new building envelope, new heating and cooling systems.  Taken together with a suite of other decisions that grew out of our early energy modeling of the project, the project achieved a 35% improvement over code baseline. 

Bringing in daylight and natural cross ventilation, the new design maximizes the benefits of available sun in winter and abundant shade in summer provided by the wooded context while retaining the tie between house and site that inspired the original design. 

river's edge

A new home joins an established community on a bluff to the river below. A breezeway links the house to the site and the landscape and water. An open plan connects entry to south terraces; exterior decks and terraces are joined to interior spaces; living, dining and kitchen are interconnected, with the kitchen as the "hub" and center of the joined interior and exterior spaces.  North-facing galleries connect the breezeway to all the south-facing living spaces.  In fact, every room faces towards the south -- built-in shading and solar protection are calculated and designed to provide shade in the summer and allow passive gain in the winter. Ground source heating and cooling, a solar photovoltaic system, and a high-performing building envelope round out the home's response to energy, climate and comfort.

Team:
1200 Architectural Engineers	
Charles P Johnson & Associates
Campion Hruby Landscape Architects
Wyant Heating and Cooling
Jay Hall and Associates
Coventry Lighting
Steele Engineering
GeoLabs 

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