The Garden Room

Jackie Braitman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:11:51 +0000

: Opening Your Home to a Garden Room

Whether you call it a Garden Room or Indoor/Outdoor living, opening your home to your garden is probably the single most expansive change you can make in the feeling of your house.

Let’s look at the remodeled home, above. The rendering to the left is the room prior to the renovation. It’s a typical room in almost any house — especially homes built in the early part of the 20th century. The window faces the front yard. The room is awkwardly narrow with a fireplace at the end of the room not visible in the rendering. Because the window faces the front yard and street, the homeowners usually kept it curtained to protect privacy.

To the right is a rendering with the structural changes but before the garden room was created. A screened porch off the front door, not originally visible from the living room, was turned into a sunroom. The front door was moved to the adjacent wall — creating a nice focal point as well as providing the opportunity to create a separate entrance garden (see last image). French doors open the living room to the new sunroom. Another pair of French doors open to the front yard.

The final rendering shows the effect of an enclosed patio off the new French doors. Now not only does the out-of-doors feel like a part of the house but you’re welcomed outside to the new patio.

The patio is a Garden Room. Just like any other room, a Garden Room has walls and a ceiling. In this garden room, two walls are formed from the house itself. And just like rooms in your house, you can enter the garden room from the adjacent enclosed rooms — from the living room and from the sunroom. The other two walls of the garden room are created by an 8′ tall pergola. The canopy of a tree — along with the pergola — create the ceiling to the new garden room. We benefited from existing mature plantings — shrubs and trees that aid in the sense of enclosure and increased privacy. Note: The cobble patio was raised above the roots to to avoid stressing the tree. We also worked around the water meter which became part of the fabric of the patio.

Strategic views of the street are blocked by stained glass panels in the pergola. Now there’s no need for curtains to provide privacy — the Garden Room visually and physically expands the home and provides a buffer from the street — and making use of an often wasted front yard.

All images courtesy of Braitman Design/Build

Making the Best of the Unexpected

Jackie Braitman — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:33:12 +0000

The most striking feature of this sun room is one that couldn’t be planned — the exposed sycamore rafters. And, in fact, one of the best parts of remodeling old homes is taking advantage of unexpected surprises.

The room was originally a screened-in entrance porch. The house is a 1920′s Tudor revival in Washington, DC. As you can see in the two “before” pictures, below, the entrance was through the screened porch (between the 2 azaleas in the right image). While there’s no interior before picture, you can imagine the dreary, dark interior of the porch with a low ceiling. And it certainly didn’t make for an inviting entrance to the old Tudor revival.

Exterior Before Pictures

In the “after” image, below, taken in this winter several years after the
remodel was complete, you can see that I moved and emphasized the entrance,
enclosed the porch, added skylights, and created both an inviting entry garden
as well as an enclosed patio (also viewed through the patio door in the first
picture).

While these changes would have made for a striking remodel all on it’s own,
the wonderful surprise was the elegant structure we found hidden by the old
porch ceiling. As seen in the first picture, we revealed the old sycamore
members that supported the sloped roof. I had the beadboard ceiling
painstakingly pieced around the those members and suspended the ceiling fan from
the center of the structure. It’s always a gamble when you remove a
ceiling hoping to find a clean presentable structure. In this case, the
gamble paid off beautifully — the end result was better than I imagined.

At the Intersection of Art, Architecture & Design » The Garden Room – At the Intersection of Art, Architecture & Design

The Garden Room

Making the Best of the Unexpected