Text description provided by the architects. Tucked away in an alley in central Washington, D.C., this long thin house subverts conventions of the surrounding rowhouse fabric and other alley houses being built nearby. Prioritizing a balance between natural light and privacy, the six-bedroom house features several outdoor spaces between it and its integral fence.
This is the first speculative house built using BamCore in Washington, D.C. BamCore’s Prime Wall System is a pre-manufactured system consisting of CNC-cut hybrid bamboo-wood plywood tilted into place on site. The resulting structure has continuous hollow wall cavities with no studs, significantly reducing the number of thermal bridges throughout the house. The BamCore frame is clad in cedar and pine, with heavy cedar timbers continuing the roof plane over the second-floor balconies.
A 45-foot-long enclosed south-facing porch anchors the house to its site and to the movement of the sun, creating private outdoor space while reducing the solar glare that enters the conditioned space of the ground floor. A street-facing wood screen aligns with the perimeter fence, peeling away to allow light to enter, and an interior oak stair screen continues that rhythm up to the second floor.
