LOCATION

Littleton, Colorado

YEAR

2022

STATUS

Ongoing

PROJECT TYPE

Single Family Residential

SIZE

1,200 Square Feet Addition

MEP ENGINEER & ENERGY CONSULTANT

Dake Collaborative

STRUCTURAL ENGINEER

Studio NYL

The clients for this project, a painter and landscape contractor with a growing family, wanted to add a primary bedroom suite and art studio to their mid-century modern split-level home on a wooded half acre lot. The resulting design is a series of one-story rotated rectilinear forms, splaying open to invite nature into a new courtyard space between the art studio and bedroom suite. These simple charred-wood clad boxes nestle into the backyard (filled with native landscaping) to create a peaceful retreat for the couple.

The existing house is formed into a long, rectangular volume organized around a double-loaded corridor. The new addition is pushed far from the street and into the naturally forested backyard area and the design mimics the arrangement of the original house (a corridor with the studio to the south and the primary suite to the north). However, this arrangement is subverted by an inserting a “nature wedge” into the corridor, formally splitting the spaces away from each other and opening up to a new courtyard that transitions the residents from organized and public to natural and private.

The secluded primary suite projects into nature with a "coffee-sipping" porch away from the children's bedrooms and rest of the house. This connection to nature was further emphasized by a 12' long pocketing lift-and-slide door and sculpted star-gazing skylight above the bed. With Adam Wagoner.