Custom Infill: Fitting Right In

When you ask a custom builder to name his or her greatest challenge in building on an infill site, invariably the answer is “working around the city’s requirements.” Zoning laws, building codes, setbacks and easements, height limitations, and (in some cases) earthquake building standards, all may affect projects. 
On the plus side, a new home on an infill site offers modern conveniences; the ambience of an established neighborhood; and proximity to shopping, restaurants, and other amenities—all of which are highly desirable to buyers. In this article, we take a look at homes in Minneapolis and San Francisco that are a perfect fit for their surroundings.

Contemporary Cottage

The great room is undisputedly the heart of this home, drawing sunlight from three sides and mixing cottage details such as the small square windows, versatile built-ins, and coffered ceiling (Photos: Paul Crosby Architecture Photography).

The Kenwood neighborhood in Minneapolis surrounds a lake with historical homes lining its perimeter. Kenwood had been redeveloped over time, and until recently, this site was occupied by a 1950s duplex. 
Elevation Homes of Wayzata, Minn., purchased the lot and duplex five years ago, recognizing that the neighborhood’s charm and walkability would be attractive to families. Because most buyers wouldn’t want to renovate an 8,000- or 10,000-square-foot older home, Elevation developed plans and renderings for a new spec home on the site. 
Designed in conjunction with Peterssen/Keller Architecture of Minneapolis, the spec home is long and linear to allow southern light to penetrate the great room. “It grabs that light, connects with the outdoors in the great room, and works its way back into the kitchen and dining room,” says Elevation principal Nate Wissink. 

A couple with two children (and one on the way) spotted the for-sale sign on the lot and contacted Wissink. With four bedrooms and three baths, the home fit their needs, plus it’s close to downtown and has two lakes within walking distance. “They loved the concept home, so we customized it for them,” architect Lars Peterssen says. 
Elevation Homes demolished the duplex to make way for the new home on the 60-by-155-foot lot, which tapers to 47 feet wide toward the rear. “We have a dynamic code environment for urban infill projects,” Wissink says. “With a tight site like that, there’s a propensity to have to do shoring, which is basically holding back soil on adjacent properties so that it doesn’t cave into the hole you’re excavating.”
The clients reconfigured the second floor to add a nursery, and requested a basement with a high ceiling that can be used as a media room and a playroom with a kitchen. A finished space underneath the garage serves as storage and a place for the children to ride their tricycles in the wintertime. 

Also on the wish list was a butler’s pantry. “Since the dining room and kitchen are open to one another, and butler’s pantries are usually between those two rooms, that really didn’t work,” Peterssen says. “But we relocated the staircase to make room for a walk-in pantry between the office and the kitchen, which has pocket doors to close it off.”
The office, Peterssen adds, is the kind of “away room” that Sarah Susanka wrote about in The Not So Big House. “It can be an office, a library, or anything else you want it to be. It’s away from the rest of the open spaces and is a quiet retreat for family members who don’t want to go upstairs or down to the basement.”
A 16-foot wall of double sliding glass doors in the rear of the house overlooks the wooded backyard and gives the great room the feel of a screened porch. The columns that frame the sliding doors add a traditional accent, Peterssen says. “Most of our clients want to have a strong connection between the indoors and outdoors, even in Minnesota,” he says. “And it’s important to get as much light as possible because winters here can be long and dreary.” 
The front porch is another key design element that is prevalent in Kenwood. “It projects a friendlier appearance,” the architect says.
Minneapolis interior designer Martha Dayton worked with the clients on a blue-and-gray color palette. To add a pop of color, they chose an orange barn door for the opening between the kitchen and mudroom. Nine-foot coffered ceilings; coved molding; and chocolate-stained, hardwood floors mingle with contemporary features such as a kid-friendly 8-by-4-foot kitchen island and a mudroom with built-in storage. 
The home is 4,000 square feet, but from the street it has a more modest scale in keeping with the 1½-story homes in most Minneapolis neighborhoods. To accomplish this, Peterssen/Keller pulled the roof down as low as possible: “We dropped the main gables and artfully used dormers to minimize the scale and massing.”
Wissink names the great room as one of the home’s most striking features, pointing out that “it has three sides of light, which is very rare when you get into these urban conditions. To do it with the southern exposure really makes that room feel special.” 
Given that the homeowners would be spending the majority of their time in the great room, Elevation Homes used a variety of built-ins to dress it up or down depending on the use—TV night for the family or socializing with guests in front of the fireplace.

Total Transformation

This home in San Francisco’s Noe Valley retained structural elements of the 1908 cottage previously on the site, but it was clad in new redwood siding and extruded aluminum windows that give the sleek walls some dimension (photo: Bruce Damonte).

Demolition of structures in San Francisco is prohibited in most cases, so when it came to building a new home for a client in the Noe Valley neighborhood, the architect and builder had to be resourceful.“We were forced to build a new house with an old one in the way,” says builder Andy Poage of Dijeau Poage Construction, in South San Francisco. 
The old house in question was a 1908 cottage that had been added onto repeatedly and not in an aesthetically pleasing way, says architect Maura Abernethy, principal of Studio VARA, in San Francisco. The client had owned the property for 15 years and originally planned to do a kitchen renovation but agreed with Abernethy to gut the interior and turn it into a new home. 
Dijeau Poage kept enough of the existing structure to satisfy city requirements and replaced the foundation to bring it up to code and comply with seismic reinforcement standards. The existing doors, windows, and siding were also replaced and updated to meet code and dovetail with a 2,000-square-foot addition. 

Abernethy specified painted redwood siding and aluminum windows with extruded jambs “to give the wall plane some extra depth,” she says. New amenities include a garage, an electric-car charging station, solar panels, and radiant heat.

Although the home has three levels, it reads from the street as two stories because of a steep slope to the rear. A staircase separates the public spaces to the south and the private spaces to the north. The new garage is incorporated into the public massing, with guest suites above and below. 
To the north, an open living area encompassing the kitchen, living room, dining room, and study flows out through a folding window wall onto the deck, which has panoramic views of the city and East Bay. The master suite and laundry room are located above this space. The lower level has a temperature-controlled wine room, family room, and guest room. To maximize privacy, the window in the master bedroom is screened with mahogany lattice work.
Custom built-in casework with natural veneers—hand-picked by the client—unifies the kitchen and living room. “We used an olive ash wood that looks a bit like oak but with a different grain,” Abernethy says. The flooring is custom-stained oak. Pale blues and whites create a color palette that is sparse yet rich.

The staircase is a sculptural statement: a single piece of steel bent into treads and cantilevered off the wall, with a glass guardrail.

“We took every opportunity to bring light into the new residence,” Abernethy says. This included transom windows over the kitchen cabinets, which draw natural light but screen the view from the street.
The staircase is a tour de force in and of itself: a single, bent plate of metal cantilevered off the wall, with a glass guardrail. 
One of the keys to the success of this project, Poage says, was the amount of forethought that went into every detail. “For example,” he says, “we pay a tremendous amount of attention to the layout of the tile and the location of all the valves and showerheads early on, often before we’re framing those rooms, so we can get them just right.”