What 193 Residential Projects Taught Us About Designing Homes in Colorado
There is a point where experience stops being about having a portfolio and starts becoming a body of evidence. For F9 Productions, our residential project database has now reached that point. Of the 325+ architectural projects in our master archive, 193 are classified as single-family residential.
That is 193 opportunities to see what works, what does not, what clients actually value after the design meetings are over, and how radically different the word “home” can mean from one project to another.
Some are compact. Some are more than 10,000 square feet. Some sit on urban lots. Others sit on acreage. Some include workshops, hangars, garages, decks, greenhouses, or accessory living spaces. Some are highly designed custom homes. Others are renovations where the best architectural move was to make an existing house work better.
Looking across all 193, several lessons stand out.
Lesson 1: There Is No Standard Definition of a Custom Home
The easiest way to misunderstand residential architecture is to begin with an image of what a house is supposed to be.
Bedrooms. Bathrooms. Kitchen. Living room. Garage.
That list tells you almost nothing about the people who will actually live there.
One project in our database, the Vanek Barndominium in Nederland, combines roughly 2,700 square feet of workshop space with living space adjacent to it. The Webb Residence in Erie includes a roughly 3,000-square-foot hangar area as part of the overall program. The Gambrell Residence in Fort Lupton incorporated phased construction along with an RV barn.
Those are not eccentric extras added after the architecture was figured out.
They are the architecture.
A good custom home should be specific enough that you can learn something about the owner by studying the floor plan.
That is what “custom” should mean.
Not expensive.
Not complicated.
Specific.
Lesson 2: Square Footage Is a Terrible Measure of Architectural Difficulty
Among the 150 residential projects in our database with a recorded total project area, the median is approximately 3,675 square feet.
But the range is enormous.
The recorded scopes stretch from only a few hundred square feet to a custom residence exceeding 12,000 square feet.
That experience has taught us not to confuse size with complexity.
A 10,000-square-foot house can sometimes be easier to organize than a 1,000-square-foot one because the larger building has room to solve problems with space.
Smaller homes are less forgiving.
Circulation consumes a larger percentage of the plan. Storage becomes more important. Mechanical equipment still needs somewhere to go. Doors still swing. Furniture still occupies real space. A badly placed hallway can waste a meaningful percentage of the entire house.
The Irwin Residence in Trinidad, for example, was a remarkably compact residential project compared with many of the large homes in our portfolio.
The architectural challenge was not making it bigger.
It was making the space count.
That is often harder.
Lesson 3: The Best Floor Plans Are Really About Relationships
Clients understandably begin by talking about rooms. Architects have to think about what happens between them.
How far is the pantry from the kitchen?
What do you see when you enter the house?
Where do groceries travel from the garage?
Can somebody work in the kitchen while somebody else moves through it?
Does the primary bedroom have privacy from the main living area?
Where do muddy boots go?
Can guests find a bathroom without walking through private portions of the house?
What happens between the interior and the backyard?
After 193 residential projects, we are convinced that these relationships matter more to everyday life than almost any isolated architectural gesture.
The successful house is not merely a collection of attractive rooms.
It is a sequence.
Good residential architecture makes daily movement feel obvious.
Lesson 4: Garages, Shops and Utility Spaces Deserve Real Design Attention
One recurring pattern in the database surprised us when we began looking across projects as a group. Garages, that are the right size to fit vehicals, and workspaces are often major parts of the residential program.
Not just two-car garages.
We have designed homes with RV storage, workshops, hangars, oversized garages, detached garages, equipment storage, and combinations of living and working space.
In Colorado, that makes sense.
People have skis, bikes, boats, campers, tools, fishing gear, motorcycles, woodworking equipment, landscaping equipment, and all sorts of other things that rarely appear in architectural photography.
Those things still have to live somewhere.
Treating the utility side of a house as leftover space usually produces a worse house.
The better approach is to understand how a client actually lives and then design the service spaces with the same intentionality as the living room.
Sometimes the mudroom is more important to the success of the house than the dramatic stair.
Lesson 5: Design for the Way the House Will Be Built
The Gambrell Residence offers another useful lesson. The project was organized around multiple phases of construction. That changes the design problem.
The architect cannot only ask what the finished house should become. We also have to ask whether the house works after Phase One, whether future construction can happen without destroying earlier work, and whether structural and mechanical systems anticipate what comes next.
That thinking applies beyond formally phased projects.
Clients’ lives change.
Families expand and contract.
People begin working from home.
A parent moves in.
A garage becomes a studio.
A basement gets finished.
A future owner may use the house differently.
We cannot predict everything, but good residential design can leave room for change.
Lesson 6: More Architecture Is Not Always Better Architecture
One of the temptations in custom residential work is to keep adding.
Another room.
Another roof form.
Another material.
Another architectural feature.
Another thousand square feet.
Experience tends to push us in the opposite direction.
Every addition should earn its place.
Every corner creates cost.
Every roof intersection has to drain.
Every material transition has to be detailed.
Every extra foot of exterior wall affects the building envelope.
Every new room eventually has to be heated, cooled, furnished, cleaned, maintained, and repaired.
Complexity can absolutely be worthwhile when it creates something meaningful.
But complexity by itself is not architecture.
Often the strongest move is the simpler one.
Lesson 7: The House Has to Work on Tuesday Morning
Architecture is photographed under extraordinary conditions.
The lights are on. The counters are clean. The sun is low. Nobody left their backpack next to the door. Real houses do not live that way.
Real architecture happens at 7:15 on a Tuesday morning when two people are trying to make breakfast, somebody cannot find their shoes, a dog wants outside, the coffee is brewing, and a delivery is sitting on the porch.
That sounds mundane. It is also exactly what houses are for.
After 193 residential projects, we have become increasingly interested in the architecture of ordinary life.
A house succeeds when the big architectural idea and the small daily realities reinforce each other.
Lesson 8: The Client Should Be Visible in the Architecture
There is a danger that comes with experience.
Once an architect has designed enough houses, it becomes easier to design another one.
That can be a problem.
The goal should not be to develop a formula so efficient that every new client gets a variation of the previous client’s house.
Experience should make us better at recognizing problems.
It should not make us less curious.
The most rewarding residential projects are the ones where the final building could only have emerged from that particular combination of client, property, program, budget, and architect.
That is much harder than applying a style.
It is also much more interesting.
193 Houses Later
Our residential archive includes urban homes, rural homes, mountain homes, additions, remodels, barndominiums, compact houses, large custom residences, production models, houses with workshops, houses with ADUs, houses with hangars, and plenty of projects that resist easy categorization.
They do not point toward one F9 house.
They point toward a way of thinking.
Listen carefully.
Understand how the client actually lives.
Let the program matter.
Spend complexity where it creates value.
Solve the unglamorous parts.
Make the floor plan work before worrying about the photograph.
And never assume the 194th residential project needs the same answer as the first 193.
That is the lesson we hope to carry into the next one.