This modern house has a one-bedroom apartment over its garages, with a full kitchen, a private deck and its own stairs, so family can live close by without getting underfoot. The house is listed at 11,273 square feet, and from the outside it’s all flat roofs, cream walls and tall windows.
I’ll walk you through it the way you’d see it in person, starting at the front porch. We’ll reach the apartment after the kitchen and the garages, and the tour ends on the lower level with a theater and a sauna.
Specifications:
- 11,273 Heated S.F.
- 9 Beds
- 8.5+ Baths
- 2 Stories
- 4 Cars
The Floor Plans:
The house has two stories over a finished lower level, and there’s one drawing per level. The upstairs drawing shows both the owners’ suite and the whole apartment.
The Front Porch and Foyer
From the driveway, the front of the house runs 130 feet from end to end, which is longer than a basketball court. The front door sits about halfway along, with a tall block of stacked stone rising just to its left, above the roofline. The porch wraps around in an L and is deep enough to sit out on.
Inside, the foyer is one of the smaller rooms on the main floor, about 13 by 11 feet, yet its ceiling is 22 feet high, so the first thing most visitors do is look up.
A living room opens off the foyer to the left, a quiet place to sit with a visitor, and the dining room is to the right, with no doors in the way. Behind the dining room is a butler’s pantry, a short room lined with counters, where platters can wait on their way from the kitchen to the table.
Straight ahead from the front door, a long hall crosses the whole house, with the bedroom wing to the left and the garages to the right. On the far side of that hall, the house opens up.
The Main Level Floor Plan
The Great Room and Kitchen
Across the hall, the great room and the kitchen share one open space under the same 22-foot ceiling. The great room has space for two separate seating areas, and its fireplace sits at one end, next to the main staircase.
Along the back, a row of glass doors opens to the big covered patio, which stretches behind both the great room and the kitchen. There’s space out there for a couple of sofas and an outdoor dining table, with a roof overhead to keep them dry.
The kitchen has two islands. The one closer to the great room has seating along one side, where friends can sit and talk while you cook. The other is a prep island with a double sink between two dishwashers, so after a holiday dinner both can run at once while the counters are cleared.
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The cooktop sits on the kitchen’s far wall, the one toward the garages. There’s a second kitchen hiding on the other side of that wall, and we’ll get to it after the sun room.
The Sun Room, Spice Kitchen and Walk-In Pantry
Off the back of the kitchen, the sun room has glass on three sides and a 15-foot ceiling. It sits between the big patio and a smaller covered one, so on a cold morning it’s the closest thing to having breakfast on the patio.
Back inside, behind the kitchen’s cooktop wall, is the spice kitchen, a small working kitchen for the cooking that smokes, splatters or smells, so the main kitchen can stay neat when company is over. It has a cooktop of its own, back to back with the main one, plus a big sink and a refrigerator.
At the far end of the spice kitchen is a walk-in pantry lined with shelves. The spice kitchen also has a back door onto that smaller patio, handy for taking the trash out without carrying it through the main kitchen.
Back out through the kitchen, the long hall runs on toward the garages.
The Office and Mudroom
Partway along the hall, a short passage on the right leads to the office, at the front of the house, with windows facing the street. It has a closet and a full bath of its own, so it can become a main-floor guest room whenever someone needs one. Its door is off the hall rather than the foyer, which gives an overnight guest some privacy.
The hall ends at the mudroom, where the family will come and go most days, and in a house like this the front door ends up being mostly for guests. The mudroom has a bench for pulling off boots, a long counter and a sink for rinsing whatever comes in from outside.
The mudroom is also where the apartment’s stairs begin. At its far end, an outside door opens to a small stoop, so the person living upstairs can come and go without walking through the rest of the house. The garages are right here too, so we’ll look at them before climbing those stairs.
The Two Garages
There are two garages, a one-car and a three-car, and both have a door straight into the mudroom, right beside the apartment stairs. Both are about 25 feet deep, so a long truck or an SUV with a bike rack fits without a squeeze, and the single bay makes a natural everyday spot for the person living in the apartment.
With four bays, there’s room to charge an electric car or two, and a charger is one of the easier upgrades to plan with the builder. A faster home charger costs about $700 to $2,000 to install, according to HomeAdvisor, and the price goes up when a garage needs new wiring run for it.
The big garage doors face the side yard, which means the street sees the house instead of a row of garage doors. The rendering below shows that side, with tall, narrow windows on the garage wing’s front wall that help it read as part of the house.
The Apartment Over the Garages
The apartment is the wood-clad block over the garages. Its stairs climb from the mudroom in one straight flight, with no landing or turn, and arrive in its living room. The kitchen is open to the living room, so the person cooking can still talk to the person on the sofa.
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The kitchen has an island with a sink and a seating overhang, and the cooktop and refrigerator sit on the wall behind it. It’s a real kitchen, not a microwave and a mini fridge, so there’s no need to come down to the main house for meals.
Down a short hall are the bedroom, which has a walk-in closet, and a bathroom with two sinks and a tub. A washer and dryer sit behind folding doors in the hall between them, so nobody carries a laundry basket downstairs. It’s one of three laundry rooms in the house, along with the ones on the main floor and upstairs.
The Apartment’s Deck and Storage Room
A door from the living room opens onto a private deck of about 26 by 15 feet. That makes the deck bigger than the living room itself, so in warm weather it works as a second one.
At the far end of the deck, a door opens into a big storage and mechanical room, and that door is its only way in. That one room is larger than the apartment’s living room and bedroom put together, which is a lot of room for holiday boxes and suitcases.
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All told, the apartment is about 844 square feet, and its only link to the main house is that stairway down to the mudroom. It suits a parent who wants to be close but independent, or a grown child saving up for a place of their own.
As drawn, the stairway opens straight into the mudroom, with no door at its foot. That’s one of two things I’d settle before building, and both are in the last section. For now, we’ll go back down and cross the whole house to the bedroom wing.
The Main-Floor Junior Suite
Where the long hall reaches the bedroom wing, a door on the right opens into the junior suite, which fills the back corner. With a fireplace and a balcony, it works as a second owners’ suite.
The bedroom has room for a king bed and a chair by the fire. A pair of doors beside the fireplace opens onto a wide balcony, and because the lot drops away on this side of the house, you step out from the main floor and find yourself a full story above the yard.
Off the bedroom are a walk-in closet and a bath with a freestanding tub under a window, two sinks and a shower with a head at each end, plus a separate toilet room.
Between this suite and the apartment, a parent has a real choice. The apartment suits someone steady on the stairs who likes to cook, and this suite keeps everything on one floor, close to the family, with an elevator down the hall for trips upstairs or down. The same wish to keep a parent near is behind a modern farmhouse with an in-law suite, in a much smaller house of 3,416 square feet.
The Rest of the Bedroom Wing and the Elevator
Farther down the hall, another suite runs along the side of the wing, with windows on the side yard and its own bath. At the front of the wing is a flex room with a big corner window. It can be a guest room for the grandkids, an office or a hobby room, and its bathroom doubles as the hall bath for guests.
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The main laundry room is on this hall too, and so is the elevator, which serves all three levels of the main house. The drawings leave room for its shaft, but the elevator itself is still to be chosen with your builder. Fixr puts most home elevators at $35,000 to $60,000 installed, so it’s worth getting a price early along with the rest of the bids.
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For the upstairs, we’ll walk back along the hall to the main stairs beside the great room, which come out near the owners’ suite.
The Owners’ Suite and the Other Upstairs Bedroom
At the top of the main stairs, a hall runs along the open space above the foyer and great room, so you look down into both on the way. The owners’ bedroom is the biggest in the house, about 25 by 21 feet, with a vaulted ceiling and a fireplace.
Across the back, a wall of glass looks out onto a long, narrow deck. There are two walk-in closets, one off the bedroom and one off the bath. The bath has the same freestanding tub, two sinks and double shower as the junior suite downstairs, but in a room of about 12 by 22 feet, nearly three times as big.
The upstairs laundry is right outside the suite’s doors, a few steps from both closets. If you like having it that close, a Craftsman with a private owners’ laundry goes a step further and puts one inside the suite.
At the other end of the hall is the second bedroom on this floor, with its own bath and a narrow balcony across the front. The apartment is on this floor too, over the garages, but the two-story space above the great room and the apartment’s storage room sit in between, with no door through. This bedroom and the owners’ suite have the upstairs to themselves, and it stays quiet even when every bed in the house is taken.
The lower level is two floors down, by the main stairs or the elevator, and it’s the part of the house built for fun.
The Second Level Floor Plan
The Lower-Level Bonus Room, Bar and Wine Cellar
The main stairs come down into the bonus room, the largest space on this level, with enough floor for a pool table and a sectional. There’s a fireplace here as well, and the ceilings are 12 feet high, taller than the main rooms in most houses.
Because the lot slopes away, the back of this level is above ground, and the bonus room looks out through glass to a covered patio tucked beneath the junior suite’s balcony. Builders call this a walkout basement, meaning a lower level with daylight and its own door to the yard.
The bar runs along one side of the room, with a sink, a dishwasher and a refrigerator, so the glasses never have to go upstairs to be washed. The wine cellar is near the foot of the stairs, with racks on both long walls.
A short hall leads from the bonus room toward the front of the house.
The Theater, Sauna and Lower-Level Bedroom
The theater is the first room along that hall. It’s about 19 by 22 feet, with room for a wall-size screen and two or three rows of recliners, and its 12-foot ceiling leaves space to raise the back row on a platform.
Across the hall, another flex room leads into a changing area with a bench, then into the sauna and a bath with a shower. The sauna has tiered benches for several people, so it’s a sauna for the whole family rather than a one-person cabinet in a closet.
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Put a treadmill and some weights in the flex room, and this end of the floor becomes a home gym with a sauna attached. The last bedroom is at the front, with its own bath. Two floors below the owners’ suite, it suits a teenager or a guest who keeps different hours.
Theaters and bars aren’t only for houses this big. A one-story New American plan fits both into the optional basement of a house of about 4,100 square feet. That’s the end of the tour here, apart from a couple of choices worth making before this one is built.
The Third Level Floor Plan
BONUS: What to Decide Before You Build This Plan
It helps to know the rough price of a house like this before thinking about changes. HomeAdvisor gives $200 to $550 a square foot as the usual range for custom homes, which would put 11,273 square feet somewhere between about $2.3 million and $6.2 million. Next to that, the two changes below are small, and they’re cheapest while the house is still on paper.
The first is a door at the foot of the apartment stairs, with a lock. It gives the person upstairs real privacy, and if the apartment were ever rented out, you’d want that door in place anyway.
The second is planning for a stair lift, so the apartment still works if the stairs get harder someday. The elevator doesn’t reach the apartment, but a single straight flight is the easiest kind of stair to add one to. Stair lifts run about $2,000 to $20,000 installed, according to HomeAdvisor, and curved or extra-long rails are what push the price up, so a straight run like this one should land near the low end.
If the apartment is what caught your eye, a European plan with a garage apartment has a one-bedroom version over its garage, in a house about half this size. And in this one, which room would you spend the most time in?