The Lot
| It’s high time I started blogging about a project that has taken up most of our days for the past three years! I’m going to start with where we started: the lot. From there, all things flow, as we have learned. The Google map to the right shows the position of our lot marked by a green arrow. I’ve turned the terrain on to show the view possibilities for that general area. Click on the "View larger map" link to open in a new window and turn off terrain, or show satellite imagery, to get more sense of what the area looks like. Our lot is in an unincorporated town known as El Granada. It’s 2 minutes north of the coastal town of Half Moon Bay. | View Larger Map |
| Here are some photos of the property, just before and just after we started clearing it out. You can view the pictures in this blog, or just click on them to see them in larger format. It’s a challenging lot to build on, to say the least. Hard to imagine a 3600-foot home on that sloping sliver. |
Well, if you’re here, then you’re probably interested in learning more about the lot itself. This is the "nitty gritty" writing about the lot, with lots of details and realizations that ultimately influenced the design of the house itself.
Easements
The thumbnail image links to a PDF file that shows our lot where it sits on a south-facing portion of El Granada Blvd. While the overall part of the lot is similar in size to its neighbors, it became the "sacrificial lamb" to the access road that serves 9 other lots that would otherwise have no access to El Granada Blvd. So, the western portion of the lot is given over to an access easement, on which the access road currently exists. Additionally, the southernmost end of the lot is reserved for a sewer easement, which means that no permanent structures, landscaping or otherwise, can be built on that portion of the lot. Essentially, each easement works to define what can be the "building envelope" of the house, because the easement line determines the boundary where set-back calculations begin.
Setbacks
San Mateo County building regulations dictate that the minimum set-back requirement is 40′ from the front of the lot, 10′ from the back, and not less than 5′ on either side. Additionally, the 2 side set-backs, when added together, cannot be less than 15′ total combined set-back. This means that, for example, you can have 7.5′ of set-back on either side of the lot, and other similar combinations. For this lot, it was lucky for us that the "front" of the lot was the portion closest to El Granada Blvd, and not the access easement. This part of the lot is the narrowest and steepest portion, so it would have been the most difficult to build on, anyhow. Put the easements together with the set-back requirements, and you have the "building envelope" which is indicated in the image in the cross-hatched area on the diagram.
House Footprint
In some ways, a lot with a funky shape like this makes it relatively easy for someone to quickly dial in on the overall footprint of the house. With a larger or rectangular lot, the potential house footprint is less restricted, so you can play around with lots of different footprints. However, even for this lot there was one key decision we had to make: where to locate the garage.
Most houses along El Granada Blvd had their garage situated right on the road, primarily for the reason that this offered the only access from a car. When we considered placing the garage at the side of the lot closest to El Granada Blvd, it became pretty clear that this would be a bad idea:
- First, given the set-back requirements, we could have had to construct a 40′ long "bridge" connecting the garage to the Road, or we would have had to appeal to San Mateo County for a variance. Either solution would have been both time-consuming and more costly.
- Most square footage on the lot is toward the southern end, so an "upper garage" would have meant a single-car garage barely wide enough to fit the car!
- The best view position would be given over to the garage. This is what many people on the southern face of El Granada Blvd are forced to do in their design (including a recently built new house nearby) because of access.
So, in some ways, the lot easement which so restricted our buildable area also served to open up another position for the garage, at the bottom, south-facing portion of the lot. We knew that a garage in this location meant that someone driving into the house would have to access the main level via stairs, but we felt this was a minor sacrifice given all the good reasons to put the garage at the lowest and widest end of the lot. To offset the issue of easy access to the main level of the house when driving home with a car-full of groceries, we positioned the main door on the side of the access road, so that the occupants could pull right up to the short stairs and unload cargo without lots of climbing up and down.
Putting a garage on the lower portion of the lot gave the following advantages:
- A roomy, 2-car garage with space for both LOTs of storage, a wine cellar, and a tool/workshop area.
- A wide driveway allowing for up to 4 guest parking, in a VERY restricted parking neighborhood. In our section of the road, cars are often parked along both sides, making the driveable area one lane (typical California windy, twisty neighborhood type thing)
- The best place for "non view" space is given to the garage. At this position of our lot, the view of the ocean is pretty much obscured.
- The garage then acts as a “Platform” to lift the house to the view level.
So, another PDF image shows the same lot layout, but this time with the footprint of the house superimposed. The garage is at the south end, with some bedrooms up at the north end. The set-backs on the side are 10′ from the edge of the access lane and 5′ from the edge of the eastern side of the lot. Together the side set-backs meet San Mateo County regulations.