Design Home Mountaintop

Mountaintop Home

The living, dining, and kitchen areas are all contiguous, but each has its distinct sense of place, and a different set of views to the outside. On the north side of the house is a downstairs guest suite with a bathroom that doubles as a powder room.

The screened porch is on the northwest corner, where you can see the sunsets in the summer in the northwest. This is when screened porches tend to get used, and on this corner it never shades the rest of the house in the winter when the sun is low in the south and you need it.

Mountaintop Design

The entire second floor is the master bedroom suite, with a stair hall that does double duty as a library/office, and on the third floor is the tower room. This library/office is a good example of expanding circulation space just a bit so that it can do double duty as something else- in this case as an office that looks down through an interior window to the kitchen, and up the narrow staircase to the tower.

This house is a collection of forms that culminate in the tower. It fills its internal volume with floor space, so there is less vertical drama, but more privacy and spatial variety. This house would work best on a site that supports its vertical nature by providing the right backdrop.