Haus Gables

From the June 2019 Issue of ARCHITECT:

Haus Gables began life as a conceptual design and research project called “Domestic Hats,” which Boston-based designer and MALL director Jennifer Bonner displayed at an Atlanta gallery in 2014. “I had a hunch that starting an architectural project from the roof—not the plan, elevation, or section—might be an interesting way to think about space and the domestic interior,” Bonner says. Five years later, the whimsy embodied in those initial explorations has been realized in built form with Haus Gables, a 2,200-square-foot residence for her family in Atlanta’s historic Old Fourth Ward neighborhood.

Hanif Kara, the London-based director of structural engineering firm AKT II and a mentor to Bonner, helped her realize Haus Gables. Bonner dismissed Kara’s initial suggestion to construct the forms with steel since “we don’t build houses in America out of steel,” she says. As an alternative, Kara proposed cross-laminated timber (CLT), which is still relatively new for residential construction in this country, but can be seen as a 21st-century variation on traditional wood-frame construction.

A CLT structural system allows the realization of what Peter Eisenman, FAIA, famously termed “cardboard architecture”—a piece of chipboard or cardboard in a model can be realized as a full-scale wall of durable construction. “If it can be made on the desk, it can be made real with the same technique,” Bonner says. “But instead of a strip of glue, it’s 14 10-inch screws; it slots together that easily.” At times daunting, the process included the coordination of 87 different large-scale CLT panels from the manufacturer in Austria as they were shipped to Savannah, Ga., trucked to Atlanta, and eventually erected—over just days—on site. But the system allowed the many-peaked roof to be realized without the need for additional structural supports that would obscure the topography from inside.

At 18 feet wide, Haus Gables maximizes the available zoning envelope: The lower-level garage is accessed via a ramped drive; the main floor has a kitchen, a double-height dining room at the center, and a master bedroom at the front; and on the second floor, a second bedroom sits at the back, with a patio at the center and a living room at the front.

One problem with using the roof plan as the generator of form in a two-story house is that it’s the second-floor that enjoys the drama implied by the exterior, which explains why the living room is on the upper level where one might expect the master bedroom. On the main level, only the centrally located dining room is open to the acrobatic roof.

Befitting a multigabled house whose roofs will seem kerflooey to most, the interior projects a fun house vibe with bold applications of faux finishes and color combinations. “They’re amazing materials that are humorous and funny,” Bonner says. Most of the wallcoverings are low on the walls, like traditional wainscoting but in nontraditional materials, and they camouflage electrical runs routed into the otherwise exposed surfaces of the CLT panels.

The exterior is surfaced with a cementitious white stucco finish, in two patterns. The north and west façades display faux brick while the south and east elevations have just a few joints in the monolithic surface. Bonner added glass beads, typically used in road markings, to the stucco’s finish coat to provide a subtle reflectivity.

Haus Gables is the perfect architect’s house, in that Bonner explored formal interests outside the constraints of market forces. While CLT has a firm place in next-generation construction, it remains to be seen if the system’s formal flexibility, as evident in Haus Gables, will take off in commercial applications.

Project Credits
Project: Haus Gables, Atlanta
Client: Jennifer Bonner and Volkan Alkanoglu
Developer: Jennifer Bonner/MALL
Architecture/Interior Design: MALL, Boston . Jennifer Bonner (director); Ben Halpern, Benzi Rodman, Justin Jiang, Dohyun Lee, Daniela Leon (project team)
Associate Architect: Olinger Architects
General Contractor: Principle Builders Group
Structural Engineers: AKT II; Bensonwood; PEC Structural Engineering; Fire Tower
CLT Manufacturer: KLH Massivholz
CLT Installation Specialist: Terry Ducatt
Wood Products Specialist: 7 Seas Group USA
Civil Engineer: Crescent View Engineering
Mechanical Systems: Emily McGlohn, AIA
Façade Research: Alex Timmer
Landscape Design: Carley Rickles
Size: 2,200 square feet
Cost: Withheld