Porches are Purposeful

The first glimpse of a building plan is like first light with a new telescope – a window into a universe of possibilities.

Six months after seeing the land, four months after closing on it, and a month after finishing the survey we had our first rough sketch from Rodney, the designer.  This followed a lot of back and forth, a long Saturday morning brain storming session on speakerphone (Nora’s favorite form of communication), and the entry of a (very) rough – and quickly ridiculed – drawing into the record by Mike.

Rodney’s sketch was hand drawn on a plain piece of paper and not to scale – but it began to lay out what might be possible in a relatively modest house. Equally important, it raised a whole series of new questions for consideration.

An open floor plan presents a number of necessary trade offs.  You get light and a feeling of space, but you lose surface area.  Locating furniture and artwork is more complicated. Defining living areas is a challenge. But the basic layout for the first level was there in Rodney’s drawing, and Nora loved it.

The topography of our land lends itself to a narrower, deeper footprint. There’s a strong start: front to back view from the foyer, master bedroom and powder room tucked to the side, the mudroom (including laundry and pantry) to the left, and a kitchen with light and a chance to annex more territory in the next generation of the plan. Most importantly, there were big deep porches to the front, side, and rear, something we’ve always wanted.

“Porches are purposeful,” said Rodney in a call to discuss next steps. They extend the living space, and the footprint of the house on the land. In the south, they’re thoroughly inhabited, so much so that the eastern North Carolina city of Wilson passed an ordinance a few years ago forbidding the use of “indoor furniture outdoors”.  The move was not universally popular – “the ultimate yuppification of the south,” an Emory history professor called it. Others were even less charitable (including Rick Bragg, in an article for the NY Times Indoor furniture outdoors).

We’re reserving judgement on where to put the Barcalounger pending a review of Orange County zoning regulations, but in the meantime the design process is now considered to be formally underway. Phase One, our current status, includes “preliminary floor plans and front elevation, sufficient to convey the architectural design of the project,” as the contract with Rodney describes it.

Among other things, this means scaling up the drawing to determine the actual dimensions of the floors. Our job: photograph the existing furniture and artwork to get an idea of how it might be situated.  A quick survey of our current equipage suggests serious triage will be required. One too many sofas and not enough porches.