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An Airy Rollingwood Home Skillfully Balances Natural Light with Privacy

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Before A Parallel Architecture co-founders and principal architects Eric Barth and Ryan Burke begin designing a new home, they first complete an in-depth client interview. “That is asking questions that range from where you like to travel, what inspires you, what does your day-to-day routine look like?” says Barth.

When Barth and Burke first spoke with Jordan Scott and her husband, there was no confusion about the main priority that would guide the design of their new Rollingwood home. The couple wanted a home that could meet the immediate needs of their young family as well as evolve to accommodate the changing preferences of growing children and the potential addition of another.

Photo by Casey Dunn.

For example, Jordan’s son is six-and-a-half years older than the daughter she and her husband had in 2020. “I wanted something where, as he gets older, he can have more space,” Scott says. “While the kids are still young, we wanted to have everyone downstairs. But as he gets older and doesn’t want to be around us as much, he can move upstairs.”

The layout of the first floor of the home was an important step in creating a space that connected the young family. Barth and Burke ensured that connection with the placement of the two children’s bedrooms and the daughter’s playroom near the primary bedroom and living spaces. They also incorporated a translucent wall to separate the kitchen and home office. “I have sight lines from my office and the kitchen to where the kids are playing,” Scott says.

Photo by Casey Dunn.

The couple wanted the home to provide adequate privacy—a challenge given the proximity of neighboring homes and street traffic—and Scott also prizes natural light. “Natural light is what wakes me up in the morning, and I wanted to have enough light coming into the house that I wouldn’t need to turn the lights on when the sun is out,” she says. “It’s a huge benefit to your mental health to have that.”

Balancing the desire of natural light and a connection to the outdoors with the need for privacy presented both a challenge and opportunity of building on the site. Incorporating a vaulted wood ceiling with clerestory windows in the kitchen and wall-to-wall sliding glass doors from the first-floor living area to the backyard ushers in bountiful light. The airiness provided by that abundance of natural illumination is augmented by the integration of warm interior materials, such as marble countertops in the kitchen and Moncer wood flooring.

Photo by Casey Dunn.
Photo by Casey Dunn.

The use of so much glass and the choice of natural interior materials are designed to create a continuously evolving but always calming environment. “There’s this light, quiet calmness that is driven by the ways we bring natural light into the house,” says Burke. “As the light changes through the day, it interacts differently with the interior materials in the house. But it always creates a calming and balancing attitude.”

The blurring of the boundary between indoor and outdoor is especially notable in the back of the home. Besides the floor-to-ceiling glass doors leading out to the backyard, the home features a large covered living area that can be converted into a screened-in porch with an outdoor kitchen. “You have the screened-in porch and outdoor fireplace framing outdoor space in the backyard,” Barth says. “This effectively captures and controls the landscape in a way that extends the functional living space of the home and creates an indoor-outdoor connection. There’s a relationship between the people who are inside the house and outside the house.”

Photo by Chase Daniel.

The inclusion of a connected garage to the side of the home was both functional and an opportunity to ensure privacy. “The garage program on this project sounds kind of mundane,” Burke says. “But it’s very challenging to park three cars on a lot like this without having a front door or a garage door facing the street. By setting up a car court to the side, we were able to leverage the garage as a privacy buffer.”

Since moving in 2020, Scott says that she especially appreciates the rooms her family uses most being on the first floor. “Especially with young kids, if you need to change a diaper or grab another shirt or socks, you are not constantly going up and down,” she says. There have also been pleasant surprises. One is how eager her son is to enjoy her daughter’s downstairs playroom even though he has his own on the second floor. “I thought my son would really love his own play area, and he does sometimes,” she says. “But he loves being down in my daughter’s playroom and, even though there’s an age difference, they have fun playing together.”

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