Waterfront Home Design - Reconciling Street & Waterfront Designs
{Part 4 of a 6-part series}
Buying your dream home on the ocean, on a riverfront, or an inland lake is an opportunity for you and your family to enjoy years of great views and amazing family occasions. Building a waterfront home design is likely to feature two distinct frontages, and is a design challenge that is exciting and inspiring. Homes located on bodies of water can have double personalities. Waterfront home design often requires incorporating two distinct primary entrances for the home, one for people who arrive from the land and another for those who arrive from the water.
Design of the street entrance is the more traditional task. It needs to accommodate vehicular access and be a proper and welcoming entrance. The more difficult task is likely to be how the rear entrance (or entrances) are oriented to the water and how elaborate these entrances become.
The street-side elevation (top) designed for vehicular access to the house has more limited fenestration and detailing focused around the centrally located entry door. The waterside elevation (bottom) contains extensive glazing to capture water views in all the south-facing major rooms of the house. This elevation also has four outdoor porches, a master balcony, and a pool and hot tub terrace for outdoor entertaining. Home designed by Charles Hilton Architects.
If you are familiar with the mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast, there are some perfect examples of this type of front and rear waterfront home design in the historic plantation estates along the James River in Virginia, where many waterside entrances are considered the “front door” to the home. Elegant docks extend out into the river to welcome visitors who traveled to the estate by boat and guests are entertained on patios or verandas while enjoying the spectacular views of the water.
In waterfront areas with more topography, there is often a second, and sometimes third entrance at the rear of the home. Some such waterfront home design incorporates the “walkout basement” on the bottom floor, with steps or stairs leading to a deck or patio and eventually to a more formal entrance that leads into the main living area of the home on the upper main floor. This type of design not only allows improved views of the water but can also help elevate the primary living area of the home out of a designated flood zone.
This new waterfront Georgian home has living areas on six levels, from its walkout basement recreation rooms to its rooftop deck with panoramic views of Long Island Sound. Designed by Charles Hilton Architects.
When building in a flood zone, homes must have living space, mechanical equipment, and even finished storage areas above the floodplain. Significant staircases are often required to access the raised living floors of the house. Incorporating indoor/outdoor spaces such as porches, decks, sunrooms, and bay windows is important to the success of these plans. When composing exterior elevations, something as simple as choosing window (the vertical dividers that separate glass panes in a window) patterns is often challenging. Designers, architects, and homeowners must balance historically sensitive exterior aesthetics with modern expectations of wide, unobstructed views.
A sensitive renovation to this century-old Larchmont, New York Mediterranean home in a historic neighborhood features many traditional architectural details mixed with more modern elements such as the plate glass picture windows to maximize views of the water beyond.
Such dual-focus floor plans benefit from modified circulation patterns, larger openings between rooms, and increased waterside glazing to capture the breathtaking views that make waterfront living so attractive to buyers.
In 1562, the English physician and cleric William Bullein wrote “water is a good servant, but a cruel master” in reference to the daily struggles mankind faced against “sicknesses, soreness and wounds…” But Bullein could easily have been referring to the age-old struggle that mankind has waged against the power of the oceans and rivers across the globe.
In the U.S. alone, flooding causes hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage each year. Severe storms and hurricanes flood low-lying areas of the Southeast annually, while snow and rainfall in the upper Midwest create periodic flooding along portions of the Mississippi River that can wipe out crops and force tens of thousands of people to head for higher ground.
These battles against water have forced municipalities in many areas of the country to continually update building codes and standards relating to waterfront home design to account for the staggering impact that water can have on homes and their occupants.
In his book Life on the Mississippi that was published in 1883, Mark Twain observed, “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
People who live in waterfront homes are frequently reminded that water can tell a new story on any given day. So, if you have never lived on the water and are considering buying a home to enjoy a gorgeous view, be reminded that Mother Nature can be fickle. Maintenance and care of waterfront homes is required in all seasons. Proper planning can help you enjoy your spectacular waterfront location for many years to come!
Building your waterfront home design to be as durable as possible will be the topic of our next blog.