PORTFOLIO

The house and what the owners wanted

The main house on Church Street is about 1,128 square feet, close to downtown. The owners wanted a guest cottage that looked like it had always been there.

The two lots were merged so the cottage could sit in the back corner of the property. The historic concrete sidewalks stayed, and the fence panels came down during construction and went back up at the end.

What was built

Outside

The siding is cedar shiplap, painted, and the trim matches the house: a board at the base that sheds water, notched corner boards, and trim under the eaves. The windows are trimmed to match the one original window left on the house. The front door is a Simpson door with glass in the top half, like the one on the house. The porch has a half-wall covered in siding and round columns.

The roof slopes down on all four sides, with a dormer. The rafter ends under the eaves are curved, and the underside of the eaves is beaded pine boards. Behind the siding, thin strips hold it off the weather barrier, leaving an air gap, screened at the top and bottom, so the wall can dry.

Inside

The living room and bedroom have tray ceilings, raised in the center, with crown molding, clear Douglas fir trim matching the house, and a picture rail. The living room has a window seat with storage and a run of painted cabinets with a bar sink. The water heater is hidden in a full-height cabinet.

In the bedroom, a Douglas fir hutch with doors and drawers set flush into the frame sits between two closets, like the one in the main house. Electric mats under the floors heat every room, and a whole-house fan pulls in cool outside air.

Bathroom

The bathroom has a pedestal sink, a heated tile floor, and a shower with a long, narrow drain along the wall. A glass block wall separates the shower from the toilet. The floor tile has a star pattern and a border. A fan that turns on by itself when the air gets humid clears the steam.

The main house

We have kept working on the main house since 2013. The work has included a new kitchen cabinet and a Douglas fir hutch in a bedroom alcove (2013), fastening the house to its foundation (2015), a heat pump for heating and cooling (2016), electrical and plumbing changes (2017), exterior paint and repairs (2019), and porch and dormer repairs (2022).

What made it interesting

The cottage went to the Ashland Historic Commission for design review in February 2014. The reviewer wrote: “Very good match of materials, siding & windows.” The one suggestion was a bigger porch. We widened the footprint from 18 by 24 feet to 20 by 24 feet, which added 20 square feet inside and the covered porch.

In 2015 the City of Ashland gave the cottage its Historic Preservation Award for a Historically Compatible Detached Addition, crediting Ben Treiger as designer and contractor. The Ashland Historic Commission said “the attention to detail is truly breathtaking.”

The foundation is a concrete slab that is also the floor, set 12 inches below ground at the edges to stay below the frost, and insulated underneath and on its outside edge with 3-inch rigid insulation board. Work from the street needed a sidewalk closure and a partial lane closure, so we drew a temporary traffic control plan for the city.

The cottage was blower door tested in February 2015 at 373 CFM at 50 pascals (6.66 air changes per hour), with a measured leakage area below the report’s recommended level.

Code requires bedroom windows large enough to climb out of. Up-and-down sliding (double-hung) windows that size would not have matched the house, so we used crank-out windows made to look like them.