A modern family home for racing bike enthusiasts

Arch11 designed this family home in Boulder, Colorado in accordance with a slightly unusual brief: the clients wanted a home “as modern as their racing bikes”. Architect EJ Meade said it was one of the more interested briefs he’d had. “They had all of these other bike-related needs like a specific room to store them in, a ramp they could ride right down into the basement directly from the outside, a room to store all their PowerBars and gear in”.

In the architects words, it’s “a place where the domestic life of a young family weaves with the values of two professional athletes and the outdoors. Where this distinction may separate those roles, lines in this structure seeks to bind and integrate. Anchored on a downtown corner site, home has an all glass living room and Site-cast, board-formed concrete walls. The latter both moors the building to its site and provides thermal mass to control temperature swings. The house is organized around crossing dihedral lines–one phenomenal and one tectonic—that shear the interior volumes. This was the first house that Arch11 designed under Boulder’s new compatibility guidelines, which really restrict how much square footage you can have on the lot and how you express that square footage. In order to fit the homeowner’s program on the site, we incorporated a large basement that stretches under the house but also has abundant natural daylight. The total square footage is 5,000 sq. ft. with only 2,900 sq. ft. above ground.

Sustainable features abound with this house, including: solar passive orientation, thermal mass, fly ash concrete, recycled steel and aluminium, soy based foam insulation, FCS certified timber, VOC-free interior finishes, led lighting and high performance glazing.

[Photography by Raul Garcia]