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PLANBOOK

NOTE FROM SOIL AND HEALTH LIBRARY:
In this chapter there are 15 large house plans.
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A Village House

Many people, for many reasons of their own, want to live in town. If that is your pleasure, here are some of the considerations which will influence your planning.

You do not regard architectural conformity as a prime essential in your living plan, but neither do you wish to startle or offend. If conformity can be had at a reasonable price, you prefer it. Since you are to live in close proximity to your neighbors, you want to play, as far as your convenience will permit, by your neighborhood's aesthetic rules.

The area available to you will be small, and surrounded by firmly established families. They will welcome you as a newcomer, junior grade.

In the usual property line, or "lot" plan, the depth of your property as measured away from the street will be somewhat greater than its frontage. The neighboring houses will be closer to yours along the sides of the property than at the back.

Street and property lines once were laid out to include a handy convention called the "alley," which was in effect a back door street between two front door streets. The alley permitted a house to have a back and a front. With the passing of the alley, the "back of the house" has vanished. Everything is now presented to the street side of the house, including gas, water, electricity, sewage facilities, parcel delivery trucks, repair men, garbage men, bill collectors, trash collectors, milk men, mail men, grocery men, asphalt driveway salesmen, and, stumbling through this welter, the community association arriving for its afternoon meeting. Your village house has four sides, but one side, still sometimes called the front, usually is asked to do all the work.

Much of your work and play will be indoors. Your house in a village setting will have to be larger for a given amount of family activity than it would have been in a more secluded spot. For outdoor loafing areas, you will want a reasonable though not unfriendly amount of screening. Loafing is a lost cause if too many people watch you do it.

If at all possible, you will want to avoid the conventional driveway aimed straight at your garage door. Courtesy to your guests requires off-street parking, but without the necessity of moving two cars to get a third one out. In snow country, the snowplow certainly must not deadend at the garage.

Ideal orientation of your house to the sun's movements may be difficult because of space limitations, zoning rules, set-back and boundary line clearance. If so, your interior plan, which is controlled by no regulations, can be arranged to adjust the family's movements to the sun.

All of these considerations will cause you to pack a lot of functions into a relatively small land area. This is not as difficult as it may sound. Most of the questions suggest their own answers.

If the question is conformity, from the street your house will not appear much different from those on either side. There probably won't be any "front" door. A drive-in area will lead eye, auto, and foot to a "middle" door, observable from the kitchen window, which is the center of the whole plan.

Since the street side has all the utilities, the "barn" functions will be there. Social functions will be mid-way, just beyond the drive-in area, and private functions will be far away. Outdoor functions will remain somewhat formal, related generally to indoor facilities. For example, the dedicated gardener will find it pleasant to spend more of his time in a greenhouse, from which the outdoors is available at his convenience.

It is all fairly simple. If you will lay aside your previous conceptions of how a street-fronted house should be arranged on the inside, your village house will practically design itself. Here is a sample. Though it is only a sample, it may serve to indicate how you can achieve an extremely useful house on something less than half an acre.

A Valleyside House

Every year good house sites are harder to come by. Still, the chances are that right in Briggsville there are many excellent spots which have been overlooked. Some of them are only a mile from the center of town.

You remember that in order to find something you want at a reasonable price, you will look for what other people aren't looking for. Most people believe that a house site above the road is preferable to one below the road. Therefore, if you want to find a site close to town, you will look below the road. The garages will be at road level in either case. In both cases, you will want to present a reasonably conventional facade to the street. What you do as the valleyside drops away and becomes the intervale is your business. Privacy in which to indulge your personal whimsies is easier to find below the road than above it.

Another virtue of the valleyside house is that water seldom flows over the tops of hills. It always finds its way into the valleys, having made them in the first place. The chances are there will be some water, either visible or available, in the vale below your valleyside house.

Here are some of the things to be considered.

As you approach the bottom of a valley, the climate gets more severe. Cold nights are colder, and hot days are hotter. Never put a house in the extreme bottom of a valley if you can avoid it. A moderate amount of air drainage makes for a moderate climate.

Consider the possibility of flooding, and stay above the flood line. That is not hard to determine. If the area being drained through your valley is only a few square miles, you have no problem. If it is a million square miles, go somewhere else.

We all like water, and lush meadows, and so do mosquitoes. In the early evening at the valley-side house you will live on your screened porch.

From the road, your house will not look imposing. The passerby will not get the full treatment at a glance. Many people, including me, regard this as a virtue rather than a fault.

Compass orientation of a valleyside house is extremely important, because possible barriers to sun slope and air flow are to be avoided. A valleyside facing south or southeast is much the best; east retains many virtues; west or southwest valley slopes are tricky but can be fine if your interior arrangement takes account of the problems; north is—well, nothing is impossible, but for the same amount of ingenuity and effort I think you will be happier elsewhere.

Here is a trial design in which I suggest essentially two separate houses, a little one on the road and a big one facing the vale. My sketch suggests that in the roadside house you could have a workshop or run a business, undisturbed by the presence of your family some fifty feet away. You will notice that what I have called the office need not be built at all. Starting from the garage you reach the valleyside through a screened path. The length, direction, and elevation levels of this path are determined by what you want and how the land lies.

The valleyside house components can be built as and when you like, undisturbed by passersby or immediate neighbors. I have suggested that the two-level section be put up first. It is very expensive to add height to an existing building. As your family or your income grows, add single-level extensions at each end. Increasing length can be achieved any time, with no dollar penalty, if you have laid your plans for this extension in advance.

A Hillside House

This sketch of a hillside house is offered with the firm reminder that it is only one of a million possible arrangements. Nowhere are there any two hillsides with the same aspect, slope, road location, wind, rain, and sun slant, or the same near, middle, and long view scenery. Nor are there any two hillsides with the same zoning regulations, tax assessors, neighbors with or without horses, school bus stops, ground or piped water, proximity to the fire station, or reliability of electric power line maintenance.

One thing about hillside building is that it is impossible, sensibly, to make any two houses alike. It is expensive to remodel a hillside. It saves money to do your remodeling with pencil and paper, that is, re-plan your house and leave the inexorably unique hillside alone.

Hillsides can be exploited architecturally in many different ways. Given any slope—westward, for instance—you can go up or across, advance toward the road or retreat from it, put the entrance where you please, the lawn where you want it, locate the sunset to suit you, build the house on one level or let it climb the slope, and find the view from wherever you have decided to put yourself in order to look at it.

If you have an east or south slope, read the same remarks and fill your sketchbook with possible orientations, all beginning with the direction of slope. Given a north slope, continue to read the same remarks but reduce your expectations. A good house can be built on a north slope, but because your orientation options have diminished your ingenuity has to increase.

Here are some points to consider about a hillside house. Most of them are in one way or another involved with our tendency to make too much of a good thing.

A little way up the hill you will find plenty of air drainage and a moderate climate. At the very top of the hill, as at the bottom, the climate gets severe. There is too much wind, too much rain, and too much work to get there.

It is difficult to choose the right location on a hillside. When you stand with your feet in the grass, remember that your line of sight is many feet lower than it will be when you stand inside your completed house. A few vertical feet make a big difference in what you see. Please bring a stepladder. Then you won't site your house much farther up the hill than it need be.

Vertical distance is costly in leg work, especially if you're carrying groceries. It also reduces water availability. If you're buying water from a pipe, every vertical foot costs you half a pound per square inch in water pressure at the faucet.

That man who mows the grass will know that a moderate slope of moderate length is easy to work on and easy to maintain. A steep slope, or a long one, once disturbed, will give you no end of erosion trouble.

Your hillside house may require two driveways and two parking areas, the upper for convenience and the lower for weather emergencies.

If you live in snow country, remember that a hillside house (above the road) is harder to reach than a valleyside house (below the road), because a snowplow coming to clear your driveway prefers to make its first pass downhill.

In this sketch, I have used five ground floor levels. For its size, this house achieves a maximum of south wall. It also achieves maximum privacy at a minimum of exterior surface. Four of the five levels are connected by what I call the communication porch. Though it may take you a while to get used to this idea, it has many virtues. Stairways, which chew up expensive inside footage to achieve nothing but going up and down, are here located in a sort of quasi-outside.

Whatever we call this design, it's cheaper than many. It permits the entering guest to get under cover quickly, then take his choice of which door he wants to enter. Also it's the only way I know to eliminate the fire danger of sleeping on an "upper" floor.

A Waterside House

Out of a hundred people who came to me wanting to buy land, ninety-nine of them insisted that they wanted to be on water of some kind, the only difference between them being in the amount of water they had in mind. Their understandably atavistic desires, ranging all the way from a bird bath to an ocean, have been expressed in the way our populations have always arranged themselves in some fashion between land and water.

Water is fluid-soft, flowing, buoyant, beautiful, and dangerous. No wonder we love it. Fluid water, our stuff of life, having apparently no will of its own, is able to fit comfortably into any container until it gets excited. No wonder we admire it. We like to look at it from far and near, listen to it, swim in it, float on it for work or pleasure in everything from kayak to liner. Man has always been willing to risk its dangers to gain its bounty.

The dedicated watersider can't get close enough to the water to suit him. His numbers are growing rapidly. There doesn't seem to be enough waterside to go around, so the buyer must travel farther to find water room. Oceansides near population centers have become marine apartment houses. The first trick in finding waterside may be to leave the ocean to its lovers and look for inland water instead. In terms of water frontage, there's a lot more of it.

The next trick may be to find a piece of waterside that didn't look too good to the rest of the folks. This is where your imagination becomes important. The more obviously good sites will already be occupied. You will look for the good ones which aren't so obvious.

Almost everything you will have to consider in a waterside house will originate in one way or another with the water itself. For one thing, the waterside may be crowded, yet to enjoy the water you will need to design your house for reasonable privacy. I would rather have the only house on a small pond than one of hundreds on a big one. How you may feel about it is another matter.

Some of your water neighbors, if there are any, will be addicted to thunderously high powered outboard engines. They present a problem to those in search of acoustic repose. If you yourself find your repose in the making of a loud noise, no criticism from me, but also no comment.

If the body of water is large, you will be buffeted by wind, but favored with moderate extremes of temperature, the water itself being a thermal reservoir. If your water is at the bottom of a narrow valley, your winds will be less violent, but the high-low temperature variation will be greater.

Your most serious consideration will be water level. I know of no body of water that maintains an exactly constant level. In most cases there will be discernible flood marks. You must, of course, stay above these. Possible low water may then be inconveniently far down. The most dependable water level is found in a good sized pond with controlled outlet and not much drainage area above it. One of the least dependable situations is on a large river. The house sketched here is not suggested for such a setting. It is also not suggested for those oceanside areas which have extreme tidal range. These special problems can be solved comfortably enough, but in other ways.

One nice thing about my trial sketch is that car park and boat are separated by three jumps of a teen-ager. Another goal I pursued in sketching was relative family privacy from the neighbors, yet the opportunity for family members to be relatively private from each other when they wish.

You will notice that private house two can contain either boat stalls or bedrooms or any combination thereof, as you wish. In fact, you don't have to build that part of the house at all until you get around to it. Structurally, it's a completely separate entity.

A Lost House

"Getting away from it all" ranges, architecturally, all the way from providing for an occasional week-end to taking care of full time living. Because of the variety of demands included in the concept of getting away from it all, the boards, stones, and machines must be competent for all occasions, but adaptable to your mood.

Most people have something of a problem in deciding what they really want the lost house to do. They start out by saying, well, let's toss up a little shack in the woods where we can get away from it all for a couple of weeks in the summer. Having begun this way, they're hooked. They want to get away from it all for a spring week-end, then for a couple of winter week-ends, and then of course there's that trip to look at the fall foliage. Soon their sturdy friends discover the place and want to borrow it for a winter week of skiing. All of a sudden the little shack in the woods is neither large enough nor warm enough.

In the not-very-extreme case, the owners of the little shack in the woods find that with changes in family, occupation, and finance, they want to live there all the time. They regret that the money they've been putting into the place still hasn't made it suitable for full-time survival.

Even if this point is never reached in your case, the uses of your retreat house will inevitably increase. Its value to you will increase in inverse ratio to the time spent getting there. The closer it is, the more you will use it. Four hours' drive up-country may once have been fun, but the five hours getting back never was. Don't put your lost house too far away, and keep some part of it equipped and ready to receive you. The water system should be functioning and some part of the house simmering along at low heat.

Once you possess a lost house, the number of friends who are willing to share it with you seems to keep growing. This delights you, and your house should be capable of sheltering, in some fashion, about four Eff people, or four times the members of your own family.

Since the house was intended to be lost, you will not find it convenient to fix and tend and mend. Your house must take care of itself most of the time, then on demand offer a warm heart of refuge in cold weather and an expandable spread when the thermometer is smiling.

I'll tell you about one serious problem rather than let you find it out later. A full-time house, known to be full-time, can be left the year round with its doors unlocked. Thieves know better than to open an unlocked door. Sad to relate, however, your part-time house, known to be part-time and known to be unobserved (because that's the way you wanted it), becomes a target for every easy-going pilferer who can find his way to Tumble Creek Road. Your lost house requires a come-back-later room where the negotiable valuables can be left in some degree of security.

Don't, please, fall for the notion that you can lose yourself happily at the end of a long, climbing driveway. Come adversity, you won't be able to get there at all. My advice is to lose yourself, if possible, with your entrance driveway at road level. In this particular sketch—again only one of a million possibles—I have suggested that a bench on the side of a mountain, granted level access to the road, makes for getting lost the easy way.

The house can be built in sections, as you get around to it. When you first start to get lost, everything seems easy. In this sketch I have hinted that the stairway to the balcony will be part of the second section. In the hard core beginning, you climb a ladder to your balcony. Some few years later, the children borrow the same ladder to reach their own balcony, while you are entertaining the guests.

The important thing in a lost house is to avoid the little shack beginning. Instead, establish a core of usefulness which is itself adequate for all occasions and all temperatures. From this beginning, you will never have to retreat.

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