Camp Place Residence

1519 Camp Pl.

New Orleans, LA

2019
A 20-year labor of love explores ideas on contemporary design in historic neighborhoods through the renovation of a mid-century ranch style home on a traditional New Orleans street otherwise lined with homes built in the 1860s.
Wayne Troyer + Teresa Cole, client
2,122 sf
Collaborators:

Wayne Troyer FAIA

Natan Diacon-Furtado

Daniel Kautz

Ross Karsen

Tracie Ashe AIA

2019 AIA New Orleans Honor Award

Photography:

Neil Alexander

Project Type: Interiors, Landscape, Residences

A full renovation inside and out, including new landscaping and the addition of a studio retreat space, forges a new public face for a mid-century ranch style home on a street of 1860s Greek revival style townhomes. An attached garage converted into a double-height kitchen provides a new verticality at the exterior, referencing the scale of neighboring townhomes while utilizing a fully contemporary design palette including a 3-sided glass “light box” window. Imagined as a home in a garden, heat treated ash wood slats of varying sizes create a textural façade reminiscent of a tree’s scrubby growth while also referencing the traditional exterior siding material of the area. The entire home is designed to be looked through, from inside and outside, grounding inhabitants and passersby in the natural beauty of the front and rear gardens, a linear park located across the street, and the ornate traditional architecture of neighboring homes.

New kitchen and studio retreat spaces fit atop existing floor slabs and structure, greatly reducing the amount of demolition waste, new materials, and embedded energy required for the completion of the project. Thermally treated ash slats at the exterior rainscreen are chemical treatment free, and are expected and encouraged to age and weather, softening the residence’s presence in the surrounding gardens over time. While utilized for a textural effect, the wood slats’ different depths also creates a façade which is self-shading, adding a further level of passive cooling to the rainscreen assembly, which in its use of an air gap between façade and structure also helps with heat dissipation throughout the day.

The residence has been crafted with a careful attention to scale, proportion, rhythm and texture, highlighted through a wide array of custom designed windows, doors and millwork elements. Each custom detail is geared towards providing a joyful interaction with the residents. Interior accents of re-used wood lath provides both a rhythmic warmth to spaces, while conjuring images of historic New Orleans, where a peek of lath behind crumbling plaster is a common sight.

This project proposes an alternative path to the common practice in the city of tearing down residences deemed to be “non-contributing” to their historic neighborhoods and replacing them with poorly built faux-traditional structures. Instead great love and attention has been paid to this “non-contributing” mid-century ranch home on a street of 1860s townhomes, in an effort to redefine the notion of what a “contributing” building in a historic neighborhood can be.