Crafting Open Spaces: The Challenge of Simplicity in Home Design

In Superior, Colorado, a client came to us with a specific aesthetic he was aiming for. He grabbed inspiration for his dream home from the open feel and industrial charm of warehouse buildings. Specifically, he wanted double-height ceilings, raised walkways, and grand windows that would overlook the mountains on his corner lot. Hiding behind that request was the reality that the current pesky walls play a role in home design and make it hard to transform the residence into his commercial warehouse vision. In this case, making a “simple” home was going to be a challenge - the intricate dance between structural integrity and architectural innovation.

What do I mean by the challenge of simplicity? The best way I can describe it is to give an analogy: Remember the time you stacked playing cards to build a house…you probably struggled to get those first two cards stacked up like little walls before you dared place the card on top making your first card-floor. Adding more cards was much easier once you had a bunch of them, in fact, the more you added, the easier the whole thing began to grow, and you could even feel the stack getting stronger. However, removing even a single card from the center can lead to a collapse. Remember how the house of cards got stronger once you started to place the horizontal cards…well those played an important role as well by tying the whole thing together, which helped resist lateral loads. In a way, this is how homes are built. All those seemingly insignificant, small walls in a home keep the big walls standing. Contrastingly, commercial buildings already have larger open spaces intended so those little walls don’t do much for the structure.

In our case, the large windows on the west side meant the walls required stiff columns from the floor to the upper roof, which carried that load to the opposite side of the house. Since it didn’t have a floor between it, we had to stiffen this wall up, by putting vertical LVLs in the wall at full height. LVLs are typically what you see supporting a floor load so seeing them in the wall surprised the contractor as well as the framers. In the end, we accomplished a dynamic space with the best views in Superior, Colorado. We were fortunate to have an amazing structural engineer, ​HCDA Engineering, who constantly provides creative ideas to support the project vision and allow our clients to dream big.