Your Thoughts on a U Shaped House?
I’m considering plans for our future home and wanted to see what the GBA community thought of a U-Shaped home? I discovered the website Truoba through this forum and have found their plans to be well-designed and reasonably priced. They also include the MEP plan, which is nice.
One of their plans we’re considering is this one: https://www.truoba.com/house-plans/t-921/
My wife and I really love the U shaped design for a number of reasons:
– Privacy in our courtyard-esque backyard
– Protection from the wind, as we are at 9,000 feet and get some pretty big gusts, making spending time outside a potential challenge at times
– Privacy inside the house. With the main living area separating the two wings of bedrooms, we really like the idea of more privacy within this plan. It also allows for the possibility of sectioning the house and renting a part of the home on AirBnB
– Provides natural light/views on all sides.
What are your thoughts on this plan? My main concerns would be the potential added cost of this type of design in terms of foundation size and roofs. I would do a slab foundation for this type of home and we’re also considering hempcrete for the walls, as we want an energy efficient home.
I would also make adjustments to this plan, as it’s probably too big for our needs. We would potentially incorporate the garage into one of the existing wings to make the house closer to 1,500 square feet. Would likely have less windows as well.
Thoughts/suggestions are welcome, thanks!
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I didn't see a mention of what climate you are in, but if you are in a place that gets cold or hot, the larger surface area to volume ratio means that you have more heat loss or gain at a given R-value, as well as having more material cost for the larger wall area. You can mitigate the heat loss or gain with thicker insulation, but that makes the wall more expensive. Whether that extra cost of heating and cooling and/or extra cost of the all is worth it to you, I can't say.
Yeah, that's a fair point regarding heat lost and cost. We're at 9,000 feet in Colorado, so it definitely gets cold and windy up here. Not as bad as some other parts of the mountains, but yeah.
In general, the more utilitarian a building is the more it approaches a cube in shape. A square floor plan gives the best ratio of floor area to exterior area. The exterior is the most expensive part of the house, all those doors and windows and siding and insulation. With anything other than a rectangle the roof gets complicated as you need multiple surfaces and have to figure out a way to join them.
These factors not only make the house cost more to build, they also make it more expensive to maintain and operate.
A room with windows in all of the walls becomes hard to furnish, you need uninterrupted wall space for things like cabinets, closets and furniture.
With all that said, all construction is about trade-offs. It's your house, build it the way you want.
Convergence,
I think there is a lot going for the idea.
Architecture is at its core Place Making, and the essential quality of a place (as opposed to a space) is that it is bounded. Most houses sit awkwardly in their surrounds and leave it to the landscape to try and create outdoor places. Using the house to do that makes more sense.
Enclosed, or semi-enclosed courtyards are in part what motivates millions of tourists to spend their holidays traipsing through the traditional towns of Europe, Asia and North Africa.
Of course that's a very different argument than the ones concerning efficiency, which Charlie and DC have done so well describing.
Well, for 2055sq feet (built in a basic rectangular shape measuring 35 feet by 60 feet) you would have about 190 feet of exterior wall. For 1500 sq' (measuring 35 feet by 43 feet) you would need about 156 feet of exterior wall. They don't give dimensions for their plan but it looks like it needs a lot more exterior wall than 190 feet. Then there's all the roof framing, hips, valleys, gables, trusses, etc. That can get really expensive.
Bear in mind that you can create a very nice courtyard with landscaping walls. Also, if you're planning on making the house a lot smaller and incorporating the garage into one of the wings then there's not much left from this plan so I would give it a miss.
I agree with the other posters that the U shape adds a lot of exterior wall area per unit interior square footage, which isn't the best layout for energy efficiency.
I'll also say that I live in a sort of U shaped home. The previous owners enclosed the interior of that "U" and turned it into additional living space, which has made the house a square shaped home instead. You may be better served building a square or L shaped home instead, then putting up a privacy wall or hedge to "enclose" the open patio area.
Bill
I like the L-plus-hedge idea. Especially if one leg of the L is a garage--then you have the conditioned space back to being a rectangle.
These are all great points regarding the cost for exterior walls. We're rethinking that design, trying to figure out how to provide the backyard courtyard feel without necessarily going this route, especially since we'll be using hempcrete as a building material.
You could build a highly efficient cube. Or you could build the house you want to live in for the rest of your life. Your choice. So long as you understand what is required to maintain it and you're willing to do that then you are well informed to make the choice.
I have advanced degrees in both architecture and structural engineering. So I was taught both points of view. If you want to maximize conditioned floor area for your budget then build a cube. If you want to have a livable home, then build only the space you need and make it the most beautiful space you can achieve.
Courtyard designs can be challenging to make work for small homes. But if your plan includes a garage take full advantage of that bulk to help you enclose the courtyard space. That goes for any kind of accessory structure as well. So often I find people build homes and then 1 year later build some dumpy 10' x 15' shed that doesn't fit at all. Why not design those kinds of structures right into your home. They don't necessarily need to be attached. But they can support your design a number of ways.
One thing to think about is exterior traffic patterns. I lived once in an L-shaped house, it was a total pain to walk all the way around if you were doing something and needed to get a screwdriver from the basement. Or if you're grilling on the patio and need to get ketchup from the kitchen.
I like the idea of using a detached garage to define a courtyard space. Put a walkway between the garage and the house so it doesn't interfere with traffic patterns.
I recently saw a video on Youtube of an absolutely exquisite modern courtyard house built recently in Japan. It's a perfect example of a courtyard design on a small scale.
https://youtu.be/A1LCKHdts3U