Young family turns parking lot into stunning eco-home (DC alley)

foreign DC we're about 15 blocks from the capitol real estate's expensive we're living on the other side of town and we couldn't afford to build and fix up one of the existing roadhouses trying to build on vacant Lots is very difficult there aren't very many vacant Lots and that's one reason DC has started to allow for the construction of new houses on alleys so we're in an alley in Capitol Hill the Alley's here this whole thing oh this whole thing is an alley oh my God it's an empty space like what even is this these are multiple long lots and this is the end of these Lots so we're standing in an alley there's multiple sort of alley segments within this alley Network and you can see surrounding us are the backs of different houses so Ally lots and DC are challenging to build on because you need to focus on privacy since there's all these different houses that are looking into the backyards but on the other hand the houses are protected from the main streets and there's a little bit more of a community feel so we're definitely closer with our trash collectors than most people but we also sort of have this natural sort of safe space in the middle of the block and you can hear now maybe like kids play out here they play Touch football and basketball and so this before was because I see Ally and Al I mean this was parking lot or what this was informal parking lot so just kind of open weeds unused it was empty except for a couple mulberries which we have milled and used in the project and then about a dozen broken down cars and trash and things like that in between the cars so bringing alley houses back here to these alleys sort of cleans up the alleys and these lots that aren't being used it's pretty obvious you've tried something different here yeah so it's essentially a compostable House made with entirely natural materials here on the south side and on the east side we have tulip poplar bark which is stripped from tulip poplars being felled for Plywood And then on the entire facade we've cladded in Cork which is a insulative cladding and then you can see there's still moss and Vines and different things that were on the trees that remain on the bark so they do very little processing to the bark and to the cork it's a natural manufacturing process and it makes for a material and a product that you can compost afterwards bark was used on this continent for Millennia Native Americans had used bark for thousands of years to clad building and then Europeans came and stopped using it but there's bark cladding on buildings in North Carolina that are over 100 years old and they're in great shape so a little driveway area these are black locust pavers this whole paver area is permeable so rain just flows down into there and then down into the sewer this area can be used for parking because you could that whole gate opens exactly we can open this thing up and bring a big bring a car in but when we don't open it the people who deliver packages can just come right in and leave them by the front door black locust sort of a weed tree but it's super hard so all the framing for the fence the pavers and then the framing for the screen porch it's black locust and then the fence cladding is sassafras which is what they make root beer out of so when it rains the fence smells like root beer and then logs in the porch are the Mulberry that was on the site so we had them filled and then we milled them and cured them well construction was happening and then slotted them into place so come on in we have a friend who's a fantastic Carpenter and he makes some doors for us so it's a pivot door there's a hinge two-fifths of the way over and it allows for a much heavier door than a sort of conventional hinge system would so we asked them to make a design that from straight on just looks like the simple vertical boards but then from up close it looks like the wood is sort of coming alive and pulsing a little bit hello he's our official greeter okay bye Momo bye-bye so these in between spaces between the house and the fence give us a little bit of privacy and a sort of backyard that we don't otherwise have just a little bit of breathing room right because you don't we don't this is it we really wanted the ground floor to feel like it was part of the ground and for the upstairs to feel like it was part of this tree language so the exterior envelope is Bam core that's this hybrid bamboo wood structural system and we whitewashed that with milk paint so that's our exterior envelope the interior partitions are clad in tulip poplar plywood so we wanted to use the same wood that we used out with the Bark for the cladding it's difficult to clad walls with plywood instead of drywall but that's a decision that we made because we wanted the inside to feel as much like a piece of furniture as like a structure and for this horizontal surfaces in the house like ceilings and stair treads we used Maple because Maples denser a little harder a little stiffer than Poplar what do you think Momo we built this house with the expectation that we would start a family here and we wanted to make sure it was as healthy as it could possibly be we thought that it was crazy for Hannah during her pregnancy to not be able to hang out around the construction site if there are materials that a pregnant woman can't be exposed to during construction then she shouldn't be living in them so like spray Foams and paints and fiberglass and all exactly and he shouldn't be exposed to that he shouldn't be exposed to it so Hannah was able to come and help us stuff the walls with sheep's wool insulation and we really didn't have to worry too much during construction and it just gives us peace of mind this Wing is a sort of eating Wing that's related to the kitchen kitchen dining screen porch everything is sort of tight and compact but it's made to flow from one space to the next and for the use to feel pretty seamless we tuck some lights up into the beams so we oversized the beams and opened them up and that way we could tuck these LED strip lights in and the goal with the house in general was to have as much privacy as possible but also as much light as possible and so that resulted in a lot of indirect daylighting and then a lot of indirect night time light so the goal is during the day we really don't have to turn any lights on to use the house and at night we don't have to see light bulbs in our eyes so privacy you mean privacy from the street because exactly yeah because you're surrounded by houses and driveways and yep totally so other alley houses in DC they built right up to their lot lines and they even sunk down there's a 20-foot height limit on alley houses in DC and so some Builders are sinking the ground floor down a few feet but it makes for these spaces that are adjacent to the alley and that are sunken lower than the alley and so people walk by your house and look down into your living space and it's very uncomfortable for the people that live in them so here we have no views from the alley into the house we have huge glass sliders and windows and we don't have to worry about blinds or curtains or anything another cool feature of the fence when the light shines on the fence sometimes the fence catches the light and it lights up the Interior Space more than it would be without the fence at all so we're actually creating through reflection more light than we would have otherwise so we use it as the screen porch we also use it sometimes just by opening the doors and not having to sort of pull screen doors shut it's nice as a sort of extension of the house so this is the wood that was cut down from the piece of land that we built the house on because you had to cut it we had and it was a scrappy tree it was it was a weed tree that was growing up in between the cars that were broken down here so nice cut feet on this right oh yeah it has mixed some nice noises rainbow well so these were I think 150 dollars for all these pavers and it's just sort of usable and durable how much work a few hours it's just really nice how luxurious this feels it doesn't feel like some you know Earth house that's sort of trying to be try to be something it's actually just really it almost feel like a spa or you know it's not granola it's natural without being granola we wanted to use natural materials in a way that people in DC would appreciate hopefully and so this was built for a very economical cost per square foot but if you're willing to put a little bit of time and patience into wood it can be a very luxurious material and more wood everything yeah so the kitchen cabinets are the same Poplar plywood and everything is as simple and natural as possible so IKEA cabinets that we built custom faces for the dishwasher similarly just has a panel face conventional dishwasher conventional fridge freezer it's just great Simple Wood facing and simple brass handles all the places that you touch throughout the house on the inside are brass and on the outside are copper so we wanted to keep that consistent sinks throughout the house are made from brass and they came from Morocco they were pretty much the same price as aluminum sink Bubba and then of course we have the mesh net above and the mesh net lets us bring light down from the Skylight above and still use the the space as a play Space it's great and it has allows for light to come in but because it's white it often catches the light and makes the space feel brighter than it would feel without the net at all so because we use the net here we decided that it's what we should use for the stairs so it's the sort of railings and fall protection for the entire stair as well made by a catamaran net company the inspiration was we like to be comfortable and we like to lounge around so you know you can remove the middle segment or slide it around and make a more conventional sort of u-shaped couch and with a baby we just sort of like to keep it together and use it as a big big surface is this your space this is Marie's play space in his little Library shelves and he hangs out while I work from home Mama yeah go play there you go there's your laptop this is sort of the home office corner and yeah it's great how it's so open I mean you really feel it here like yeah so this whole sort of um bar has access Visual access to the TV and the TV can swivel so the kitchen gets the TV the kitchen also gets the dining room and the screen porch and then the living room has the sort of office in the kitchen so in each of the spaces as we use them we can the other of us can be in the adjacent spaces and we can all sort of coexist and still have the space we need great desk by the way it's a vintage desk from the 19 teens and it can be adjusted and it can be raised and lowered so I can sit at it it can be tilted it can be flat so this is like a little side yard that I use while I'm working and there's a little chair out here the rain chains and it's just uh like these other little side yards of space to sort of expand a little and step outside oh it's it's very self-contained yeah and you can't even see it from the apartment building next door it has actually a lot of privacy yeah does it bother you that there's not more yard like you feel like you need yard for anything do you no a lot of people around here use their backyards for parking and they might have a few steps in the front for a front yard so it's not that much different than a normal Row House in DC and as you'll see upstairs our Hall is pretty big and we use that sort of like a backyard so it's nice to have these little side yards that each serve their own function these are natural materials and they're not conventional but they're off the shelf we wanted to eliminate unnatural materials so like cork is a good example cork had a huge presence in the United States until World War II at which time the Germans started torpedoing our shipments and we had to create Alternatives like plastic and foam so we invented these artificial products that we now use for building materials because they're still around but when possible we like to sort of revert back to Natural materials they're always going to be healthier I think here we have our coat closet hiding underneath the stairs and then if we keep going around we have our pantry under the stairs on the kitchen side and then on the other side we have a taller closet sort of our substitution for a basement which we did not build that looks like a hard fold it is a little easier when it's less crowded you're gonna take us upstairs Momo yeah okay up we go okay camera as we go up you probably feel a breeze and it's because of the sky two of the skylights above us are operable and so we're able to sort of pull air from the house up and when it's really nice out we'll just open all the doors and pulls all the air up and out wow this feels like really the center of the house this is the center of the house and in some ways it's the backyard yeah so we spend a lot of time up here and we get a lot of light and you know we can be in here very early in the morning we can be in here until late in the evening and this is sort of the same shape or scheme as the Roman domus with the atrium in the middle and with Roman domuses they're often sort of side yards and small courts that are enclosed by tall walls and fences and so they were dealing with a lot of the same issues that we're dealing with here in terms of privacy and relation to sort of Street and the frontage and things like that so the primary bedroom area is a sort of blackout bedroom laying instead of just blackout blinds we knew that we wanted to sleep well this bedroom Wing is on the north side of the house so we don't have any windows we have this big west facing sliding door with a private screen balcony so that we can have a little reprieve area just to ourselves really feel like a part of the neighborhood here totally I mean you can see up here how much visibility we would be getting if we didn't have privacy in mind so alley houses typically are uncomfortable for the inhabitants because of all this visibility but it's the sort of placement of Windows and having big Windows downstairs and a big skylight with small windows on the second floor that give us the Privacy that we need so here again we're using scraps these pickets are the scraps from all of our roof framing and we like to find ways of using the Surplus creatively so that we don't end up with the Surplus no no and then we can close the blackout blinds to make the room very dark the wall that separates the bedroom from the rest of the house is clad and Cork and then all of the Interior partitions in the house are stuffed with the scraps of the cork cladding from the outside so wherever possible we try to reuse scraps and the Cork and the wall cavities doesn't sound and just makes the whole house a lot better sound insulated wow it's it feels really calming in here and just like quiet and yeah it's nice yeah this Wing is always the space where we end up standing around spending the most time talking this darker sort of more mysterious area just feels calm and it's relaxing and it's comfortable and this is a a pink tour this is also milk paint it's paint made with the proteins of milk and so it's what Farmers used to use for their fences it's what you know people have been using for thousands of years to sort of coat and seal things to give them a white wash we love milk paint because it's water-based so on the BAM core the water draws the grain of the wood out a little bit and then the black it's not a petroleum-based coating on top of the wood it's really like a pigment it makes the wood black the next space is a bedroom in the closet again the goal is turning on as few lights as possible throughout the day having as much indirect light as possible at night so you know in the closets we have lights that turn on as soon as you open them and play all the light throughout the house it's a warm temperature so that your eyes can be relaxed then it provides the light that we need there's space there I mean you you can just yeah you know it's a lot of closets we actually when we moved here we we moved all of our stuff in and we thought we had enough space and then both of us had forgotten that there were also these compartments so then we had all this new closet space that we didn't realize so just really easy we did use MDF we tried to make them economical and so this space can be closed from the bedroom and closed from the bathroom and used you know when someone else is sleeping and then the bathroom too can be used separate we have a big shower tub sort of unit it's like wow it's a real experience yeah so we covered the walls and many of the surfaces in the bathroom with a product called micro cement which is a multi-layered very thin cementitious product that can be waterproof we put a little texture into that micro cement so this type of light catches it and that gives us the sort of continuous dark black look and we wanted again the black so that our eyes are able to relax and it's just the light that we're seeing and not all the reflected light and then again everywhere everything that we touch is usually brass but when possible we sort of like for the fixtures to recede a little bit too it's interesting how you have but if so and that gets back to sort of Japanese understanding of light and dark and then being a balance and there being a Harmony between them if it's all light then you don't see light you're just sort of blinded so you need the darks and you need the Shadows to emphasize the lights and especially today in this sort of hazy gray day where there isn't much light when you have darker spaces that let your eyes relax you can appreciate the light we love shadows and we love what black can do to emotions and the mood of a space and of the people inside the space a background that lets life come to the Forefront I mean we so often play with Murray in the closet and he looks in the mirror and he's really into it and we bring him into this tub and the light on him glows when we're in this black space and if we go over to one of the white spaces it's just sort of bright everywhere so you're able to sort of highlight light and texture and color through a black background in a way that you aren't able to in brighter spaces I can actually brighten this a little bit and so yeah this is the bathroom space the custom concrete countertop brass sinks we can use the mirrors for different effects so this is how I shave and it's all off the shelves except the sinks off the shelf simple products you're using again the the sinks yeah the brass and something that we like about brass for interiors is that in very low light situations the shininess of brass catches any light that there is so if we turned all the lights off in this space with the little light that there is we'd still see all the brass pieces and then there's a small toilet room in here you have room instead of your house yeah we had thought about putting a usable roof deck on top but the height limit in alleys is 20 feet 20 feet on flat roofs is measured to the top of the roof 20 feet on a pitched roof is measured to the midpoint of the slope so here 20 feet is the midpoint of the roof we're able to get to 21 and a half feet at the skylights in the middle so that's one of the reasons for a pitched roof is trying to get as much height as we can and it means that the exterior ceiling Heights are a little bit lower but that's where it wants to feel a little more intimate so this is um Murray's Nursery this is the bath room where we have a tub we've also cut a little clear story window above the tub so that we can bring light from the Skylight down into the bathroom and then concrete countertops with brass sinks walls our walls are milk painted over the overbam course so that's why you see a crack here this is the first sort of season of temperature changes for the BAM course so we'll come back later on and fill some of the cracks because the building has adjusted its moisture content to the site so it's kind of a living construction definitely it takes a season or two for all of these wood building components to settle in and adjust to each other once they all find their relation to the humidity it becomes a tighter construction but it takes a little bit of time so putting all these skylights in the middle here was that it looks complicated but it's really just a simple grid of four by twelves that we wove together and then we used two by twelves to trim it out so the choice of this is so doing plywood instead of drywall more expensive more expensive certainly the materials were more expensive it also requires more Precision install and drywall is just super cheap but drywall to us is one of the laziest materials it's easy to install it's cheap it can get junked up and repaired quickly but drywall off gases and it doesn't really work great unless it's painted and so you have to add toxins to make it work well when you strip it down and replace it it's not biodegradable and so for a house that we hope will be here for potentially centuries we think that not having junky drywall is well worth the investment because I think it looks so much better looks better feels better feels better it's warmer it's there's so many it breathes better it's when you touch it it feels better we have too many splits in this house to heat and cool and then all the other air movement is handled by a central energy recovery event later which controls the humidity and the dehumidification and the filterings and it does fresh air intake so that fresh crisp air it makes the house Feel clean and it makes it feel healthy and that in conjunction with the wood and all the cork that we have inside the interior partitions it just feels better to breathe let me go out there let's show them foreign so we we tell them it's like a hammock and not like a trampoline he loves climbing on it [Music] yeah what inspired the net it just seemed like a nice doubling up of uses for the space is it regulated it's created a floor just traded or nothing yeah maybe for our inspection I think we had a guard rail up so it was treated as an Atrium but and we have this too which I mean he doesn't he goes he was a little bit younger we would use this was like a date we got a lot of direct light we got indirect light throughout the day and then the mesh net really brightens the space sometimes catches the light and brightens everything up the evening light it can totally change the atmosphere of the spaces so here it's drawing your attention to the structure to the grid of the beams and the columns and yeah it makes the the space feel more internally focused and light's another one of these materials where if you're a little patient and you're a little creative it can become a luxury I mean we're just getting started with this there aren't many houses that are built to be healthy there are plenty of houses that were built As Natural houses like Frank Lloyd Wright was a natural architect but being explicit about the health of the occupants and about the health of the places that the materials came from that's relatively new using materials and having priorities that don't cost money but result in a better way of living it just requires a little bit of thought you have a lot of felons you are not afraid of showing it white why I think this can be I think you can show in your past yeah we like honesty so we're we're not trying to deceive anyone and we're not trying to hide anything we have spent a lot of time traveling and visiting old buildings and learning from old buildings then when they're honest and when they use materials how the materials want to be used then they age well and they gain durability but when you're trying to hide whatever you're doing a disservice to the house or the building and your deception will eventually be revealed by time and by water and by air oh hey hey we don't want to be embarrassed by any decisions that we make even long after we're gone we want these houses to make us proud when we're gone so they need to be able to age well without us

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 199,644

Keywords: urban infill, cork clad house, alleyway home, alley house, washington dc, dc alleyways, dc historic alleyways, urban planning, urban environment, smart growth, sustainable construction, sustainable building, alley dwellings, zoning regulations, capitol hill block, farm-to-shelter, roman domus house, regional building, roman domus adaptation, traditional house, modern-traditional house, back alleys, sustainable haven, in-alleys, andrew linn, jack becker, bamcore, cork

Id: 1zKNuehmjrU

Length: 29min 23sec (1763 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023