Excerpt: DASH Home is a residence designed by the architectural firm Kariouk Architects in Ontario, Canada. As with all our architecture, pragmatic requirements came first, and aesthetics emerged from those requirements. DASH Home (an acronym of each family member’s first name), unlike a standard suburban home, places the primary living functions on the second floor; the grade level is reserved for a small stair hall, a two-car garage, a caretaker suite and an elevator shaft. As such, all the primary areas of the home, being elevated, have significant privacy despite nearby neighbors. Because the natural site itself is steeply sloped, all the main living areas are in the treetops.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] This “forever home” is designed around the evolving needs of a young family. Still, it anticipates the eventuality that the parents will be empty-nesters and, finally, seniors living on their own. The neighborhood is a traditional suburb where front porches, picture windows, and two-car garages are not as many features as they are values. The clients lived a few blocks away from their new place in a 1950s tract home, and while they sought a more accessible and more artful home, they yet cherished the iconic, middle-class suburban house. The clients had two specific requests: the new home needed to permit easy circulation within every main part of the home even as they aged, and the project needed to preserve the mature trees spread over the site. The challenge to both requests was that the site was steeply sloped. Thus, creating a single-level bungalow would entail an extensive foundation, which would destroy the trees.
As with all our architecture, pragmatic requirements came first, and aesthetics emerged from those requirements. DASH Home (an acronym of each family member’s first name), unlike a standard suburban home, places the primary living functions on the second floor; the grade level is reserved for a small stair hall, a two-car garage, a caretaker suite (to be completed if ever needed), and an elevator shaft (elevator to be added if ever needed). As such, all the primary areas of the home, being elevated, have significant privacy despite nearby neighbors. Because the natural site itself is steeply sloped, all the main living areas are in the treetops.
There are two architectural volumes of the home, an oval that houses bedrooms and a study (the realm of teenagers) and a long rectangular volume that projects deep into and above the property, holding the kitchen, living/dining areas, and a master bedroom suite (i.e., the spaces of civilization). This cantilevered rectangular volume reinterprets the traditional entry porch, and its end becomes a picture-window façade to the street below. One enters beneath this “porch” into a foyer that holds a dramatic stair situated beneath an enormous skylight, which immediately draws people upstairs to the elevated main living level. All spaces are designed with cross ventilation to minimize reliance upon air-conditioning. The selective distribution of clerestory windows and skylights provide significant interior daylight and views of the sky and treetops while ensuring privacy.
As a “thank you” to our wonderful clients, both of them professors of English literature, we created a small memento that refers back to the home’s premise to both respect the site’s trees and thus the home’s placement in the tree-tops. On brass plates set into the tile floor, we carved text written by the 19th-century English poet Christina Rossetti: Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.
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