The Garden Room Addition

280 new square feet that changed how the whole house faces: a steel-windowed garden room off the kitchen, warm in February, open in July.

The brief

The Okonkwo family's Westmorland colonial had a fine kitchen and no relationship with its own backyard. You could see the garden through one small window over the sink; getting there meant a detour through the mudroom. They asked for a room that would put the family in the garden year-round, in a climate that only cooperates for five months.

The design

The garden room is a single 280-square-foot gesture: three walls of floor-to-ceiling steel-framed glass under a tongue-and-groove wood ceiling, on a terracotta tile floor with radiant heat underneath. It reads as a room, not a sunporch. The roofline steps down from the main house so the addition defers to the original architecture, and the kitchen now opens to it through a ten-foot cased opening where the little window used to be.

The build

Fourteen weeks, foundation to furniture. Because the work was additive, the family kept their whole house through construction; the kitchen wall came down only in week eleven, once the new room was sealed and heated. The radiant slab went live before the first snow.