When last we left off, I had covered my Shelter Design project. This mini-project later evolved into a much more intricate and elaborate semester-long project which I’m going to share with you today. Naturally, as I completed this project back in December of last year and have since taken a handful of more advanced classes, I look back on my presentation now thinking, “I would change this, and this, and this, and this.” I suppose there’s really no way to avoid doing that. As our skill sets evolve, naturally we want to go back and revise older work to bring it up to the highest possible caliber. And I fully intend to continue working away, constantly bettering this project. While I’m not entirely pleased any more with this execution, I’m still very much attached to this concept. So consider that my mini-”I think this kind of sucks now” disclaimer, and otherwise, prepare yourselves for some major verbal diarrhea on my part! (And I warn you, I can talk for hours on end explaining the concepts and decisions behind my designs.) I will try to be brief. Emphasis on the try.

The Challenge

As previously mentioned, this project is an extension of the Shelter Design project. We were asked to take our existing shelter and use it as a jumping off point for creating a four-room house. How we went about this was left completely open-ended and without any restrictions. We were basically given free creative range to let our imaginations run wild.

Concept

The design of my home is based on the concept of a melding of the exotic and modern style. The architecture is based on the idea of the treehouse with the haphazard placement of rooms at various angles and at various heights. The house is intended to be very open with no areas entirely shut off from the others. As a result, there are only interior doors on the two washrooms and utility closet. All of the other spaces are joined. However, even in their open-concept state, each “room” can also enjoy its privacy. For example, with the master suite, it is continuous from the main living area, however it is separated by an glass enclosed staircase which functions much like a rope bridge would in a treehouse. This helps to maintain a playful and airy feeling.

In terms of the style of the decor, I turned to a second inspiration point: Robert Schumann’s piano suite ‘Kinderscenen’ (meaning ‘Scenes from Childhood’) which is a programmatic piece of work that musically paints a picture of various memories from Schumann’s childhood. The entire piece of music is made up of 13 smaller pieces (or ‘scenes’) that depict a certain memory, much like a how a house is divided into smaller areas – its rooms. I mirrored this idea when I went about designing each space within the home; each has it’s own individual flavour and elicits a different mood, but they still all work together as one cohesive whole.

Overall, the home embraces the old and the new mixing strong geometric forms and slick white-washed fixed elements and appliances, with a Moroccan flavoured style of layering saturated hues, highly patterned fabrics, and numerous textures. The entire space conveys a sense of frivolity, vivaciousness, exoticism, playfulness and youth. It’s feisty, eclectic and extravagant, and champions all that is lush, vibrant, lively, and unconventional.

Design Influence

I researched predominantly a Moroccan influenced style to play off of and complement the treehouse-like architectural base. Morocco is like a “melting pot of different cultures and styles”, and therefore, much of what is considered the Moroccan decoration style is in fact just a blending of the styles of many different cultures (predominantly Arabic and Middle Eastern cultures). Their decor is thus often very saturated with vivid colours, and layers upon layers of rich textures and complex patterns. A lot of their colour choices stem from their physical environment – for example, golds and yellows of the desert, or the blue of the sky.

I wanted to pull inspiration from the roots of Moroccan style, and apply them to my house’s environment. My house is located along the Atlantic coastline of Canada – a polar opposite location to the Middle East. So I chose my most dominant colours from the natural landscape of the area. I chose reds and yellows as are reflected in the changing of the leaves during autumn. I also added a few punches of bright fushia to add a little extra energy and vivaciousness to the space. Additionally, there will be touches of metallic (primarily bronze, but hints of gold and silver as well) to link back to the deep appreciation of craftsmanship as seen in the Moroccan style. All of these bold colours are set against a backdrop of neutrals – mainly white, but with small hints of grays and blacks as well – to ground the space. Ultimately, I wanted to infuse the intense colours and lavish patterns and textures of the Moroccan style with a more modern, clean-cut and geometric approach to design linking the house to both present day design aesthetics and to a design style from another more exotic location from around the world.

The images posted up until this point were a handful that inspired me throughout the design process.

So now that I’ve talked your ear off, just a few more quick notes before I proceed to the actual project…

Disclaimer No. 1: Since completing this project, I’ve taken a more advanced drafting/interior design illustration class and looking back, these illustrations are terrible! Please don’t judge me on their cartoonish-ness and inaccuracies. (I’m a wee bit embarrassed to post them, to be honest.)

Disclaimer No. 2: That empty placeholder in the bottom right hand corner is where my “logo” goes. I chose to remove it before posting this here as it contains my full name (which I’m not comfortable posting online), and it’s just a plain ugly logo. I’m not a graphic designer in any way, shape or form, but until I can afford to pay someone to design a logo for me, it does the trick.

Disclaimer No. 3: These are all super, duper re-sized. Please click on each image to view them in their intended viewing size. (They’ll be much easier to read that way. I had to shrink them down a lot to fit on the blog.)

And now, at long last, we’re ready to proceed to the presentation!

And that’s that! Hope you enjoyed taking a little glimpse into my ‘world’, so to speak, and if you have any questions about anything (even after I babbled like a crazy person), do feel free to ask! :)

Note: All illustrations, text and content is property of me, Krissy (shimmerlikegold@gmail.com), and was created entirely by myself as pertains to my design studies. As this is my personal work, please do not reproduce any elements of this post without permission. Thank you.

So to make a long story short: My second semester of study as an Interior Architecture and Design (IAD) student started back in early September. I’m taking 3 studio classes. Two are IAD classes, and one is a required foundations (FND) course in drawing.ⁱ For now, I’m going to delve into one of my IAD classes: Design of the Built Environment Aⁱⁱ. This class is pretty much my first strictly design class. Conceptual Design, which I took in the summer, was the pre-requisite to this course and it essentially taught you how to work through the design process to give whatever you were designing – be it a light fixture, a piece of furniture, a room, or even an entire building – meaning and significance. DotBE is, in a nut shell, an extension of that class. However now, we’re actually designing structures which is super duper exciting! (It’s my favourite class.)

Our first assignment of the course was to create a fully functional shelter, meaning our structure had to run entirely off of solar/wind/water power and use no electricity.

Before we could design our shelter, we had to imagine the location. We had to analyze our site – where was it located, what type of environment was it in, what were the weather conditions, how did the direction of the sun affect the geography, what direction did the primary winds come from, etc. – to fully understand how nature played into and affected the location. One of the key aspects of designing a new structure from scratch is understanding its surrounding environment and trying to create a building that not only works well in that location and is sustainable to the weather conditions, but to create something that complements the site and disrupts nature as little as possible.

Above is an aerial drawing of the location I created, and below is a brief description of the land.

This location is set only a few kilometres from the ocean coastline – just close enough to smell the salty air of a crisp ocean’s breeze as it passes through toward the mainland of Nova Scotia, Canada. This rural area is surrounded by forest land filled with portly pine trees and douglas firs interspersed with the graceful silhouettes of birch and maple trees. It is also home to much wildlife, from deer nibbling strips of bark from the greenery, to Canada geese stopping briefly to take a dip in the river’s calm waters on their flight south for the winter.

Through the forest and toward the north, where lie the wavey waters of the Bay of Fundy, a weathered path leads along the coastline and up toward a naturally formed lookout point. From this higher ground, you can see for miles around. In the summer the land is ripe with berry fields, apple orchards and squash patches creating a beautiful palette of colours across the land scape. In the winter, the area is veiled in snow and ice shimmering in the morning sun.

Above is a quick ‘sketch model’ⁱⁱⁱ of my location which captures the essence of the land.

After considering location, then we could move on to designing our shelter. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I looked to treehouses for the inspiration behind my design. I really want to work off of that snug and cosy feeling of being in a small space, as well as create something that had a playful and whimsical nature much like treehouses that small children play in.

Here is an exterior drawing of my shelter. I wanted to capture the essence of a treehouse with the haphazard placements of walls. In my design, there are little nooks and crannies jutting out in different directions, and while everything is very mathematically placed, it still has that sense of spontaneity.

I tried to design my structure with as many windows in various locations as possible so that the sun could warm up the structure. Because it’s such a small space (it would be approximately 150 square feet) it wouldn’t take much to warm it up and stay warm. For warmer days, I’ve positioned windows at the three main corners of the structure at various heights to easily allow the wind to flow through to cool the space.

Though very small in size, the shelter features four key zones – the food preparation area, the sleeping nook, the wet room, and the deck.

Above is my final floor plan showcasing each area, and here’s a quick break down of each space. Click to view images in full scale.

Food Preparation Area
This area is based around the hearth and small kitchen. The fireplace is centrally located between the food preparation area and sleeping nook so that it may be used by both spaces, however it’s primary function is to supply a means of cooking for the residents of the home. The fireplace and all its inner mechanisms will be built flush with the interior wall and dry-walled entirely around it so that appears, visually, as unobtrusive as possible. There will be a thick faux wood (for fire safety) mantel below the fireplace opening (1′-0″ deep, 7’-0″ long) to be used for resting cooking utensils during food preparation. Also, there will be a removable grill located flush with the bottom of the hearth opening and just above a deep pit to place large pots above the fire.

The kitchen space is very limited in size, condensed only to what is absolutely necessary. It is equipped with a rain-water supplied sink, and a small under-mounted bar fridge for food storage. All cabinetry is painted white. The counter top is a butcher block material which is echoed in the chunky wooden open floating shelving which flanks the space.

We also designed our own cooking utensils. I won’t go into detail, but here’s a quick look at what I created for this space.

Deck
The shelter features a wrap-around deck to enjoy nature year round. It is strategically located to overlook the ocean as well as observe the setting sun.

The deck is also home to the “House Name and Symbol”. We had to create a symbol of some sort to represent our house as well as come up with a name for it. I chose to name my house “Mossflower”. I wanted something that reflected nature and the environment. Mossflower is also the name of a book I read when I was younger (“Mossflower” by Brian Jacques) whose characters were small animals that lived in small cabins and cottages, much like the shelter I designed. So the name is also a reference back to that. I think that linking back to the book was also a way to tie in the idea of a treehouse as both things were associated with childhood memories.

The symbol I created is a stencil-like graphic which will be stained onto the deck at the house’s entrance. The symbol will be stained 2-3 shades darker than the wood of the deck stain so that is stands out just enough without being obtrusive.

Sleeping Nook
The sleeping nook, as I like to call it, is located close to the fireplace for warmth and comfort. I designed a simple platform with built-in cubby holes for clothing/towel storage into the base of the bed. Function was the main reason behind this decision; the home needed storage space for these items, and raising the bed and including storage beneath it was the most effective solution to this problem.

Wet Room
I chose to make a wet room for my space primarily for space restrictions. By making the entire room a giant water-proof shower, I didn’t have to make a separate enclosure for each fixture. Instead, I placed an overhead shower head around the center of the room with a drain below it and the entire floor will slope inwards toward the drain.

The entire wet room is also lowered two steps from the main floor of the shelter. These two steps extend to the corner adjacent to the door to create a shelf/mini bench to place shower items.

We also had to properly lay out all of our plumbing with diagrams depicting where we would source our water from, how it would be treated, how it would be used within our home, where the waste water would go, how we would recycle any waste water (if possible), as well as detail all of our fixtures. The plumbing diagrams and such aren’t super interesting (unless any of you are plumbers :P), so I’ll clip this short with a couple drawings of the fixtures used in the wet room.

And that, ladies and gents, is my shelter described as briefly as possible. Hope I didn’t bore you. I honestly could have rambled on and on and on about more specifics about water systems, heating, ventilation, energy sources, etc., etc. but I fear that may have been super dull. So those are the bare bones of what I had to design. This entire process and body of work took four weeks.

Up next, is my midterm presentation which is an extension of this project to some degree. For now, let that be your only hint as to what’s to come. I’ll unveil the answers to that little mystery within the next week.^iv Until then, thanks for reading! I hope my adventures were somewhat educational, entertaining, inspirational, … whatever have you.

Note: Previously, I intended to password protect these posts for personal security. However, I’ve temporarily decided against it. I may change my mind – I’m still undecided – so if you’d like the password, please e-mail me. All posts locked prior to this announcement will remain locked, and you will need the password to view them.

Note 2: All images, text and content is property of Krissy (shimmerlikegold@gmail.com) and was created entirely by her as pertains to her studies at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA. Please do not reproduce any elements of this post without permission. Thank you.

1. For the interested, my two design classes as Design of the Built Environment A, and Introduction to Construction Documents. My foundations course is called Sketching for Communication.
2. which I’m going to refer to as DotBE since the title is freakin’ loooooong
3. A ‘sketch model’ is what we create to help us visualize our designs in three dimensions and aid us in the design process. In this case, it helps us to better understand the topography of our location.
4. Ooo, I’m sly!

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Drawings (plan, elevation and axonometric) of a selected light fixture

Now that I’ve got that gush out of my system, onto my mini-announcement. I’ve decided to add a new ‘column’ to my blog: Adventures of an IADⁱ Student. This section would chronicle my journey through my degree giving insight into just what a design student does, and a glimpse at some of my work along the way. I’d really like to document my progress and I thought this would be a fun way to do so. This won’t be a scheduled column; it will be sporadicly posted dependent upon what sort of projects and assignments I’m working on/have completed.

This section of my blog will be password protected! I’m not doing this because I have anything terribly secretive to say. It’s only because I’m not sure I’m 100% comfortable with publishing the work I do towards my degree for the whole world to see. And not that I find myself the most terribly interesting person in the world that I expect my fellow classmates to Google me, but as a precaution, I don’t think I want them stumbling upon this aspect of my life just yet. So I would simply like to be able to monitor who’s reading/viewing my work. Nothing more than that! If you’d like to read about my progress through my design degree, you can shoot me off an e-mail (shimmerlikegold@gmail.com) or reply here and I’ll send you the password. :)

1. Interior Architecture and Design