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When I was younger, I loved art and I did a lot of drawing and painting and thought I was gonna pursue more of a career in art or fashion, but when I got into high school, I had a specific professor who taught technical drawing, and he encouraged me to do some assignments outside of the norm and I loved it and I just ran with it.

[upbeat music]

So much of what I love about doing architecture is the craft and how well things are built.

So in order to make something well-built, you have to understand how it goes together. Like, that is about 13 feet by...

For the porch project, the first time I met with the clients, what they said to me was, "We don't enjoy this outdoor space that we have now, so we'd like to have this screen porch."

"We want this porch to look like it has always been there. We want it to look seamless. We want it to feel like it was part of the original design and the original architecture."

So in this project, the challenge was, how do we make a space that will fit proportionally with the existing house and mimic some of the details at the existing house, but also introduce some of our own, too, that were appropriate to a screen porch?

So we used the kind of craftsman style that's at the existing house and borrowed some of those features and brought them into the porch.

The clients were also concerned about it making the inside of the house too dark, so if we built this big, deep porch on the back, was it going to affect the light that they loved inside the kitchen and the family room?

I suggested introducing these skylights, knowing that that would help bring some direct light in to the floor and if we could glow the inside of the porch, that that would at least give the impression from the inside that it was still bright, even if we didn't have direct sunlight coming in.

I wanted to give this impression that it was almost a hole in the roof so the skylight was invisible and it really felt like you were on the porch looking up directly to the sky.

By trimming it out the way we did with the wood with a very minimal profile to the tongue and groove ceiling, and kind of furring it in along the edges gave a very clean edge and kind of hid the frame even, so that when you're in the porch and you look up, you just see the ceiling material straight to the sky and you don't even see the frame of the skylight.

I think that they use it a lot. I think they even use it more than they thought that they would.

They eat out there. They drink their coffee out there. They read out there. They've entertained out there.

It's another room that's an extension of their home and they seem to love it.