Residential garage addition

Our Client, the owners of this historic house, wanted to improve their existing two car parking pad by building a garage that would compliment the architecture of the existing house and provide a mud room and entry corridor into the basement of the house. The existing patio and topography of the site presented several challenges to accomplishing these goals, but in the end, we developed a solution that met all of our Client's criteria.

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In order to enter at the basement level, we removed and rebuilt a portion of the existing patio so that there was useable space below, rather than a crawlspace. We also had to cut two new openings in the existing 18" thick poured in place concrete foundation. Working with Capstone Structural Engineering & Consulting, we developed details to create these new openings and make the new garage addition attach seamlessly with the existing residence.

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Because of the location of the first floor windows, the garage roof needed to be flat. Rather than looking out across 400 square feet of roof membrane, we proposed a low intensity green roof planter tray system that helps to reduce impermeable surfaces on the site (and thus mitigate storm water runoff), protect the roof membrane from ultraviolet light, and provide a small amount of thermal mass to help with tempering the garage temperature.

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The final challenge we faced during the design was that despite of all our work, we had identified through our initial zoning feasibility review (something we do at the beginning of every project) that we would need a setback variance from the Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA). We created the presentation packages and presented to the Registered Community Organization and then to the ZBA where we were granted  the variance unanimously.

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