3
Bathrooms
4
Bedrooms
3,196
Square Feet
Expansive glass walls connect the living spaces to the surrounding trees and the skyline beyond in this newly built, Mid-Century Modern style home located in the city of Charlottesville, VA. Skylights above the kitchen fill the open-plan spaces with natural light. Wooden beams span across the interior ceilings and continue outside to extend the main roof over the deck off the dining and primary bedroom suite. Understanding the potential of creative spaces like this, before building them, requires thorough design study. Under the Comparisons tab below is a rendering we did before we built the home. Slide the bar left and right to compare what was designed to what was built.
Mid-Century Modern | Comfortable Clean Lines
Modern open spaces - Renderings help visualize before building
House Highlights
Long and low roof line - Exposed structural wood beams and accents
Large glass walls - White and black brick color scheme
Bringing the outdoors in - Charleston style side courtyard
Clean lines - Cantilever roof over front entry and side deck
Pictures | Plans | Sketches
Exterior
The client of this home loved Mid-Century Modern architecture and moved to Charlottesville, VA looking to find their dream home. They struggled finding homes that met their style, so they decided to build a new home. We started helping review and study the feasibility of the project on a vacant city lot that they found. From there, we came up with the concept sketch you see above to help them visualize what the project could look like on their lot.
With the goal of creating their Mid-Century Modern dream home, we looked to the core tenets of the style - Long and low roof lines, exposed wood, large walls of glass, and connection to the outdoors.
To achieve the desired long and low profile we made the footprint of the house 85’ long x 36’ wide, matching the narrow proportions of the lot. We decided on a single slope, or ‘mono-slope’, roof over most of the house with a low 2/12 roof slope.
Interior
It was important to achieve the open floor plan without intermediate posts or load bearing walls getting in the way. We supported the wide spans of the roof above with exposed pine wood beams that are a feature element on the inside of the home. The pine wood beams we used are commonly called Glulam beams. ‘Glulam’ is an engineered structural product made by laminating (stacking and gluing) multiple wood members together to create a single structural beam. The structural advantage of using these beams is that they are much stronger and more efficient then timbers cut from logs. We used a stock beam size of approximately 5” x 12”. The glulams let us do a more ambitious structure with less material and keep a simplified clean aesthetic. Since the look of the beams worked so well with the mid century style we used remnant pieces of the beams to create some of the custom built-ins throughout the home, including shelving in the kitchen, a bench in the foyer, and the fireplace mantle pictured above. In the picture you can see the individual layers of laminated wood.
