Hi, I'm Sean Canning principal architect at Ten Seventy Architecture, and you're watching our design rewind video series. This is a video series where I do a deep dive into the earliest projects in my career. We talk about the good, the bad, but ultimately the reason why the design ended up the way it is. As usual, there's going to be three parts to this video.
First, we're going to go over a client brief. Then we're going to do a in depth breakdown of the design and all the details that went into it. And finally, I'm going to conclude with what happened to the project and what happened with the clients. So with that out of the way, let's get into this. Today we're going to look at the Escondido Residence.
And this was my first project in Escondido. I didn't know anything about the city before I got the call for this project. I had probably driven through there, but I was living in San Diego, and as you guys know, I'm originally from New Jersey, so I was a little naive to this part of San Diego County.
Basically, the scope of work was an addition of a master suite, a family room, a laundry room, and an exterior patio. It was a single family zoning, and some of the challenges were that I had to blend my modern style with the traditional home that was existing. And the clients liked modern architecture as well, so they were on the same page here.
Clients also preferred a butterfly roof, which can be a challenging detail to get right. So that was going to be my first butterfly roof. A butterfly roof is basically where you drain all the water towards the inside of the footprint of the house. So instead of having a roof like this. The roof is going to be like this also another challenge here, which I didn't list, but the clients wanted a phased approach.
So they wanted to basically do half the construction at first and then come back and do a couple odds and ends afterwards to control their budget a little more. This is very difficult because you have to it's not like you can do, half an exterior wall and come back and finish out the exterior wall.
So the planning. Everything has to be planned together to do this. So the way we work on a project like this is we do everything through design development. We plan the master home and then we scale it back and only produce a set of construction drawings for what the client wants to do in phase one.
So we only get the permit for that first part of the work. So let's take a look at some of these design drawings. This was basically my first take at this project. So the street is on this side over here. Here's the garage and here's the entry to the home. And I've basically sketched on top of. An existing floor plan here.
And this was the edge of the existing home. What I had in this iteration of the design was the kitchen was going to be over here. I guess this was like an office area, a family room. And then the master suite was going to be an addition over there. And we were going to reuse the existing living room here.
I'd also provided some interior elevations. Now I normally wouldn't do the interior elevations at this phase, this early in the project, these days. But back then my process was a little less defined, so sometimes you would see some oddball things in some of these old sketches. This was an initial sketch at our, at a roof plan.
I don't know what I was going for here, but trying to incorporate some angled some angular, Gable roofs, so I was coming off of a successful project with that Kenosha project, which I showed you in another design rewind video, and maybe some of that was mixing in with my ideas on this project.
This was another option that I presented to them. Ultimately this was rejected. Here is an option that we went with something pretty similar to this, although we didn't do this big cricket that you see here, which is basically used to direct water down here. We ended up going with a. a butterfly roof, which basically Just drains backwards this way and then this one drains backwards this way So you end up with a large gutter kind of in the middle which drains down some leaders on both sides But ultimately we went with a design very similar to this and here's some Iterations of that design in design development.
So I guess I was looking at like kind of a two tone I think this was going to be the master bedroom by this point in the design. And we have some site walls here, which ultimately got value engine engineered out of the project. But if I remember correctly, we did end up with these angular posts, which now that I'm looking at this is very reminiscent of the Kenosha project.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I have actually gotten calls from potential clients that have asked me to replicate that post design. I don't remember if these clients did ask me for that, but they very may well have. So maybe that's why I'm showing these Angular posts. I think this was closer to the design we actually went with, which was the three post design.
One, two, three. And we did not, that did not happen. This post did not end up there. Good thing. This did not happen. So these are just basically failed iterations of the design. We did keep a detail very similar to these though, and I'll show you that later.
And here you're starting to see the beginning of that butterfly roof. So we basically ran a gutter here and another gutter underneath here, which basically travels all the way through. And that picks up all the water off the roof. Here's some sections just studying that interior space, maybe how to bring some light down in.
They did have a truss roof, which was difficult to work around. And you do see some of that truss in here. And I think I have another elevation here somewhere that shows that. I think this is pretty close to the floor plan they ultimately went with. So the master bedroom was positioned in this area here.
And we worked in a laundry room, which this, I know the laundry room footprint changed a little. Here it was accessed from the powder room. And then we have this big open space and the kitchen was here. So we ended up with a floor plan very similar to this. Let me see if I have that here.
Yeah, here's a good example of that floor plan. We have our master bedroom over here. Master suite. Then we still have one, two, three bedrooms here. Kitchen, dining room. Or maybe this is D dining room. And this is a kind of like a informal dining room and then family room. So you do have a nice sort of relationship of these rooms.
And then we have another living room over here, entrance over here. So you can see very clearly that the house breaks down into a pretty clear public and private There's a pretty clear division, and this is something that it tends to happen quite a lot of my projects. This was the site plan that I submitted to this, to the to the city, and you can see that this was my second logo, so we're on the second logo here and we're pretty close at this point to the format of the drawings that I use today.
Although my drawings have gone through maybe two or three more revisions after this. Okay, so here we have a proposed grading plan, existing grading plan. That is actually how the home ended up looking when we were finished with it. Butterfly roof like I said here, and then from the front it's going to look very traditional.
Roof pops up over here, and we have this, these three posts which kind of support that new roof. Angled posts, which are catching these beams. And then there's a beam somewhere in here, which is caught by these. And the idea is you open this up and we have this big patio space. So you create an indoor outdoor space, which is awesome in San Diego County.
This was the demolition plan. So you can see we're not to save costs. We're really not demoing too much, maybe a little bit there, a little bit there. And all this is an. It gets demoed and that creates the open floor plan. And here's the, I think this is the finished floor plan that we ended up with.
So very similar to the one I just showed you. We may have altered this. I don't know, something I'm remembering that we maybe made a change there somewhere during construction. This is the new roof here.
Here's that rear elevation and we have a side elevation here. Front elevation, so nothing really changes on the front elevation. And here's the other side elevation, and here's where all that water drains. So that's why it's such a challenging detail. Actually, here's a closer look at how that works. So there's actually two gutters.
There's one gutter here, as the water comes down. There's another gutter in here. And they both drain out towards the side. And here you can see that existing truss system that we were working with. It really created a lot of challenges to vault the ceiling, but we were able to do it here. And then, of course, we have a much taller ceiling here, and here's that angled post.
And here's some construction photos. It ended up looking really nice at the end. Looks like we got some mill guard windows in there.
There's the other side. Got some TNG soffiting going on here.
And here's where that existing wall stopped. So we had to support that. And what I had designed in here was a flitch beam. So this is a site built beam. You don't see this too much on the West Coast. But it's basically a sandwich of steel plates
with some wood like this. So it's like a Big Mac. And then you bolt through here. And the cool thing about this is, these are steel. But the contractor can build this on site. This was the first time my engineer had ever seen this beam before. But he mostly works in California and he hasn't done any projects in New Jersey.
And in New Jersey, this is much more common than it is out here. I work with Patterson Engineering. They're basically the best engineer in town. They can engineer anything we gave them and when we gave them this. He said no problem, and he knocked it out of the park. And the reason we went with this is because we wanted to see that steel here.
Because it's really cool. And the contractor came in and sanded these beams, these these wood components out. And it looks a lot more finished. And then, check this out. Here. We've also incorporated a similar detail and here we've also incorporated a similar detail. So all these details are starting to unify the project.
Kind of a combination of steel and wood. Just like the home is a combination of traditional and modern. This project was completed. The clients are very happy with the project. It took a heck of a lot longer in construction than a lot of our other projects because the clients did a lot of this work themselves or they subcontracted a lot of work themselves.
So I think the construction of this project probably took about two years where normally I would say This should probably only take about one year, maybe 18 months at the most. So the project was finished. The clients had been sending me photos throughout the construction process. But their timeline was very extended, so I wasn't allowed to make too many site visits.
But they did send me the photos. They were very happy with the project. And I believe they still live in this home because the plan for this project was to basically build their family home that they were going to live in forever. If that's the end of this video, thanks for watching another Design Rewind video by me, Sean Canning of 10 70 architecture.
If you have any comments, please drop 'em in the YouTube comment section. You could check us out on Instagram at 1070architecture. You can visit our website at tenseventyarchitecture.com. And if you wanna reach out for a project at you're thinking about, shoot me an email at info@tenseventyarchitecture.com.
Okay, thanks. See you on the next one.
