Work with Mell Lawrence Architects

Residence, unbuilt

I worked on a new house design in the Colorado mountains with Mell, and it was to be a radiant heated concrete shell wrapped in insulation, with a shell of concrete on the outside.

After schematic design, the owner decided not to move forward with the project, and for a couple of years he lived in the existing home on the property, which looked like this:

And then he came back. He had grown to enjoy living in the house, and recognized the embodied value in its design and materials, and he was actively engaging with the landscape around the house. But there were a few things he didn’t like and wanted to change; the big fireplace blocking the view, too many stairs up and down around the living area, the extraneous timber constructions, expanding the bedroom hall to create a gallery, etc.

We pitched the option of creating a new structure over the existing foundation in much the same arrangement as the initial design, arguing that the expense of transforming the house would likely match or exceed the cost of building new, and that the most significant savings would come in excavation and foundation cost.

But the client couldn’t square the idea of demolishing the house, and saw it as a waste of material and energy. So Mell created a scheme keeping much of the floors in tact but replacing the roofs with simpler forms that would compliment the interior modifications:

But the client missed the high window to the mountain from his bed, and the open sky above the outdoor table, and the kitchen table is the perfect place to drink coffee look out toward the street, and the high light you get through the skylight in the guest bedroom, and a thousand other things. Now he understood all the ways that this house gives, and losing those qualities was a bummer.

And so began a back and forth through the dawn of the pandemic, of compromise, ultimatum, and area calculations, until we presented a compromise formation:

And then the project died.

A big challenge of bespoke design; our way of living may adapt to what it is, but it is hard to make it adapt to what we are.