Awards
2015 – North American Copper in Architecture Award
2014 – AIA Chicago Distinguished Building Award – Honor Award
2014 – MCA Chairman’s Award – Residential
Publications
Video
With thoughtful design, Orchard Willow and its surrounding landscape insist that exposure to nature and desired privacy can co-exist in a dense urban neighborhood.
Located on a unique Chicago lot, the home bookends a row of repetitive single family residential lots to the north. To its south is a neighborhood elementary school whose parking lot and playground form a 75-foot separation from the school building. The site affords a side yard open to an enviable long southern exposure that provides a broad prominence along the street.
Above the wooden pavilion, a narrow, copper clad volume floats on a clerestory band of windows, bringing light deep into the broad ground floor living areas beneath it. Containing two floors of private bedrooms, the copper volume is more opaque and insular than the open living space below.
Privacy was achieved by eliminating the conventional basement and setting the first floor directly at natural grade. A board-formed concrete wall poured just above eye level encircles the property. The textural wall provides complete visual privacy within the garden, allowing much of the wooden framed interior living space to be enclosed with glass.
The distinction between family living areas at the ground and private sleeping areas above is reinforced with a noticeable shift in the material palette. At the ground level, natural materials that closely connect to the garden outside, weather and patina over time, and allow aging to be an acceptable transformation of the home. The texture and irregularity of the board-formed concrete walls allow for eventual cracks. Wood siding, initially oiled, is left to grey and a stone floor that extends out to the enclosed garden takes on the seasonal stains of tree leaves. Ascending the blackened steel and walnut stair to the upper floors, however, walls transition to simple white plaster.
Within the bedrooms, deeply recessed balconies are carved out of the copper enclosure to form light courts that shade the glazing, provide privacy and direct views away from the neighboring school, to the distant Chicago skyline and sunset. Millwork is detailed to feel more like furniture, where private rooms become containers for personal belongings.
Additional Images
Interiors: Wheeler Kearns Architects (Sharlene Young, founder of Symbiotic Living)
Landscape Architecture: Mckay Landscape Architects
General Contractor: Norcon, Inc.
Photography: Steve Hall / Hedrich Blessing