Garden House | Stuart Narofsky

Architects designing homes balance program, budget, climate, codes, and numerous issues within a cohesive design. For a dwelling in a community with a predisposed architectural review board, the process can be compounded by mandates to conform or be denied. Responding to the request for a modern home from a couple relocating to the United States from Hungary, we faced the challenge of respecting the 20th century Tudor homes in the neighborhood while maintaining the integrity of the design. In order to balance these factors, we educated and partnered with the architectural review board in the design process.

The initial scheme Narofsky presented to the architectural review board involved a mainly flat roof design, with exposed wood structural elements aligning the street scale and proportion with adjacent structures and reinterpreting the Tudor style.

During the late night meeting, without the benefit of the client present, the board denied our proposed design as too modern, and gave options of finding another property or building a traditional conforming house. We instead engaged the board as if we were a “client”, after three meetings, we arrived at a mutually acceptable solution. By adjusting the roof lines to vary both flat and pitched, we reconciled the otherwise confrontational approaches of the two “clients,” and realized a LEED Silver-certified home with a distinctly modern plan and spatial relationships that fit comfortably among its traditional neighbors.