Design Rewind: Dick Street Residence

 Hi, I'm Sean Canning, principal architect at 10 70 Architecture, and today we're gonna be continuing with our Design Rewind series. This is a video series where I turn back the clock and take a look at some of my earliest projects of my career. So as usual, we're gonna be going over initially a client brief, then the design breakdown, which can get pretty in depth.

And finally, I'm gonna wrap up with the conclusion and I'm gonna let you know what happened with the project and what happened with the clients. So with that out of the way, let's get started.

Today we're looking at our Dick Street. Residence project. This was basically the second project that I ever worked on in the city of San Diego. It was a referral from my first client who, that project I started maybe four months before this one. And. This was a client who was very interested in sustainable design as far as I recall.

I put this presentation together about a month ago, so it's been, I'm, I'm about a month removed from seeing this, so I think some of this may be a little surprising to me, so I'm gonna try to speak about it as it pops up here. So this was the home, and you can see it's kind of on a corner lot.

The home took up quite a lot of the lot and basically we had an existing garage here and then the house was like right around here. And then there was like a sunroom in here, if I could remember correctly. So the project scope of work included a partial interior remodel and addition of a dining room cuz the house didn't even have a dining room.

And finally a whole series of exterior improvements. The project zoning was single family. By the way, this is before all the ADUs and J ADUs in San Diego. So single family home had a lot more limitations than it currently does. So as I mentioned before, one of the project challenges is the client was very interested in sustainable design.

In fact, they originally wanted to do a lead home and as a leader, credit professional. We discussed that and we discussed the cost implications of that. And the client decided it would be better to spend the cost of certifying the project as lead. To add more solar panels to his home, which made sense to me.

So that's the way we proceeded.

Okay, so this was one of the prime sketches that I did to present to my clients. Back then, I didn't have as fleshed out of a process as I used today. So today we have a eight phase process where we basically run the projects through the first four phases and then enter permitting in phase five. But back, back then, I didn't have any of this ironed out.

So each presentation I could, I could have. Presented something completely different. It just wasn't as as organized as my business is today. So here's the existing home, or actually this was the this was the outline of the proposed home, if I remember correctly. It was something like this, and basically we had the garage here.

We were planning on moving. The driveway from this side to this side, which is a pretty big expense that I generally would not recommend. And I think I may have even recommend, recommended not to do it on this project. But the client was pretty insistent on that. And I believe that's how this worked.

And I think they wanted to put an addition on the garage and that's the reason they needed the curb cut over there. Yeah, that's right. I think you used to enter the garage here. And we put an addition on here to go in here. So that's a. Well, it's, it's funny how you remember those things now. This was the dining room addition.

So dining room and the kitchen was right around here and the living room was here and I think used to enter the home here, but we kind of changed the entry location. And then this entire wing here is dedicated to private spaces in the home, like the bedrooms and bathrooms. So I remember when I started the project One of the ideas was to basically create an open floor plan, add that dining room, and then use all of this area here as entertainment space on the outside.

So to study that, I actually built a model, and you can see we had kind of an exterior kitchen here. I think there was gonna be a entry in through here. That was the entry. The formal entry and then you would turn and enter the house in this direction. We had a dining room over here and you have this really interesting trellis situation going on here.

This was all gonna be parking area here, and that's what you see there is a pervious paving. We're gonna build a new fence up here, which was gonna create some privacy in the front yard. They didn't really have much of a backyard to use here. So this was one of the models that I built to kind of demonstrate these ideas to the clients.

There's another view of it. So you can see we had put a lot of thought into this sort of axial entry and there was a focal point at the end here, but then you turn and enter the home that way. I don't remember if the existing home had this articulation here or not, but we ended up creating kind of a privacy screen here with some vegetation.

And then the fence kind of continued around the property that direction. And it was kind of an interesting design. We had some gaon casings planned out here. I think this was gonna be either gaon casings or maybe some concrete formed concrete, and then the wood fence would kind of jump on and off of those components at different areas.

This was an pencil sketch. I did a medium that I used to use quite a lot more than I do now. But I do like pencil sketching. And there was a pine tree right here, and that's what I was trying to show here. Big, big, big pine tree. I think we were pres planning to save it. And I think this was probably the drawing where you can really start to see how some of these gion casings would kind of come through that wood fencing.

So kind of an interesting design. I'd never done this before. I'd never seen it done. But I spent a ton of time thinking about how this would work. And you can see it was kind of a design where the fence would articulate around these these gaon casings, which could house some like really like microphone and flora.

This was another watercolor of the front of the house. So we were proposing some sort of white stucco here, contrasted with some. Probably like a cedar siding. And then this was that focal point I mentioned earlier. So as you approached in this direction here, you would see that initially that tree before turning and entering the home.

And then we have kitchen and dining room here with, again, a standing scene, metal roof. I've been proposing these for about 14 years, but I don't think one client has ever taken us up on that offer, even though I think they look so cool. Here's another option or another angle I should say. This is the other elevation.

So here you can see that kind of, that dining room was centered on the on that new door system we were gonna put there, where you'd enter into that direction. And we had some windows positioned strategically. So you can take a, another look at that focal point. Rain change shown here. So this is the same elevation again, I don't know why I used to do this a lot, but I would rework my drawings in different mediums.

I think just trying to convince myself that I had come across the best design for the clients. So here I'm using Adobe Illustrator to basically show the same thing. And this is the other side, so kind of a mixture of stucco, metal, glass, and wood. This was a sketch on trace paper. Probably an earlier sketch.

And here again we have kind of the contrast of like this concrete material, concrete stair here, and then the wood deck, which would sit on top of that. And you can see how you'd enter the house in this direction and the focal point back here. And there was that deck and there's the trellis over the deck and there's a photo of the model.

So you can see how early. That idea was already in the works and how, how many times it's re been redeveloped. So here we have kind of a dining table over here and over here there's no dining table. So I'm not sure which, which of these ideas came first, but it's fun to look back and see all these, I guess this is one of those ideas with the exterior dining area that looks like exterior kitchen or dining table.

I'm not quite sure. Little bar area here. And then here were some mockups in SketchUp, which is actually the software we use almost exclusively today. And here's some mockups. You can see that concrete wall over here and how the fence was sort of interact with that concrete wall, but then sometimes jump off the concrete wall.

It's hybrid fence idea. Here's a, here's a couple other ideas of how that fence would work.

And then here were the construction drawings. So again, here's my old logo, my old title block demolition plan. And here we have the floor plan so we can get a closer look here. We got our master bathroom here adjacent to the master bedroom. We got a secondary bedroom. And a third bedroom. So we didn't drop the bedroom count, which is usually very important for resale.

So we still have 1, 2, 3, 3 bedrooms. We have a walk-in closet over here, so this is still part of the private space and a little corridor here, which serves to link all of those spaces together. And then we added this new dining area here. The kitchen was already existing.

And the living room. I believe the living room was existing already as well. So this basically became all of the public space with this bathroom being kind of a dual access from this point or this point. And there was another pocket door which could completely seal off this, these bedrooms from the party.

So if you were entertaining late at night while your kids were sleeping, there was a way to clear that off. Let me clear this out so you can see again. So you see you can, so you can close this. And then this bedroom here kind of became part of that suite when this door was shut here you can then c guests can come in in this direction.

So that was something the clients really liked. A little bit of an atypical design. And I do remember we vaulted the ceiling in this area here. Because I think the ridge of the home was basically sitting at this line, so we just vaulted the ceiling upwards here. And then the roof basically comes down here.

So it's going up here and here we're going up, and then we came across here Gable like this, I believe, going up, up. I think that was the basic design. Here's all that patio space I mentioned earlier.

Oh, here's the roof plan right here. It was actually a hip roof. I forgot about that. It's a hip roof, little hip here. This just became a shed roof. And then we built in another hip roof over here with a little cricket.

Here's some elevations. So you can see kind of the mixture of wood and. Stucco here, and you can see, see the same thing here. Oh, here's that shed roof that I was talking about. So the vaulted ceiling would be pretty high in that room.

And there's our illustrator elevations again. So conclusion on this project, this was a really fun project, but ultimately the clients ended up moving to Arizona. They sold the home. Before we ever submitted for permits. So we basically took the drawings all the way through construction, drawings and engineering, and then the clients decided it would be better to move out of state and they sold the home.

So unfortunately, this one never got built, but the clients have reached out to me to come to their state. I think they moved to Arizona, if I'm not mistaken. And they were considering redesigning or buying a, a, a blank lot and building a new home. So they've reached out to me to see if. I could help them with that.

So ultimately the project ended on a good note. It would've been nice to see it built, but unfortunately, due to certain circumstances, it was not able to be built. So, Thanks. Thanks a lot for watching. Please comment and share the video. Like can subscribe. You can check us out on YouTube or on Instagram @1070architecture.

Also, you can go to 10 70 architecture.com or send us an email at info@1070 architecture.com.