Wood Burning Fireplace Home
We decided to name this house the wood fireplace home because we do those so rarely anymore. Getting firewood at the beach can be a hassle, and while many people love the smell and sound of one, the maintenance can be a turn off. So can carrying firewood from the ground up to the second floor fireplace as is common on these beach adjacent properties. These are among the reasons why most of our clients choose gas. But this client was insistent and we think fulfilling their vision helped to create a unique home at the beach.
There were a few major items that they requested for the design. An open floor plan, the wood burning fireplace, a front porch, and a stair that wasn’t directly accessible from the door. These items, together, give this home it’s character.
The open floor plan works great. At the beach, with the small lots and restrictive zoning codes, breaking out separate rooms can really make a house feel small and tight. An open floor plan allows various programatic elements to borrow space from others keeping the spaces small individually, but feeling much larger. In this case, if we hadn’t done an open plan, we would have had to lose something like the porch, or added an elevator and pushed the primary upstairs and lost a bedroom or some other detail.
The front porch isn’t huge, in fact, although it does dominate the front elevation, it’s very narrow, more of a balcony. It’s large enough for two people to enjoy conversation, coffee, and people watching, and that’s all they wanted. When combined with the stair that takes up a bit more space than strictly necessary to achieve the entry sequence that the client wanted, almost all of the “extra” space we had to use was used up by the porch and stair.
Post Construction Headaches
Unfortunately, while the construction process went relatively smoothly, we hit a massive problem at final inspections. When the as-built survey was completed, we found out someone had made a mistake and the house was 4″ closer to the road than designed. With the tightness of the lot and design, this put the front porch about 1.5″ into the setback. That meant that we had to either tear the front porch down or apply for a post occupancy variance.
We assisted the owner in the application. We contended that this error was not the fault of the owner who had hired professionals to locate the foundation of the home. That it was an honest mistake, and because of the design, it had no impact on the neighborhood since the structure that supported the porch was set back and not in the required sight lines on the corner. It’s never fun putting your faith in the hands of an appointed board like this, but our arguments were successful, saving the owner thousands of dollars in rectifying this mistake. You’d be surprised how often we end up in hearings over extremely small variances in reality from the plans, but that’s part of the full service we offer.
