EDISTO BEACH HOUSE
LOCATION: Edisto Beach, SC
CLIENT: Private
AREA: 3,700 SF
STATUS: Under Construction
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Curry Engineers
DESCRIPTION: Edisto Beach House is a single-family residence located on the western-most end of the island. The inland site is roughly 0.25-acres, mostly flat, and backs onto the Town’s golf course. The design of the house has been imagined as an alternative to an uninspiring vernacular model that has become almost ubiquitous in flood-prone areas of the Lowcountry. Instead of seeing FEMA requirements as an architectural opportunity, the common response has been to simply modify familiar house forms with as minimal effort as possible to achieve flood code compliance. This results in “normal” looking houses that appear to have been lifted after-the-fact and placed on CMU piers infilled with wood louvers. Typically a large entry stair “appendage” is then added off a front porch, creating a clumsy connection between grade and the raised floor level above. The Edisto Beach house offers an alternative which utilizes FEMA requirements as the basis of all large architectural moves. In other words, they are baked into the design. The ground floor has been activated by being left entirely open without the traditional louver screen. Rather than placing the house on what is essentially an extended crawlspace reserved for back-of-house functions, this strategy allows the open ground floor to be an extension of the outdoor programming. The front stair that would be commonly found extending off the front porch has been brought inside one of the two small pavilions on which the house sits. By moving the point of entry to the middle of the floor plan, the front of the house is freed up for a generous primary suite. Finally, the structural columns on which the house is raised have also been articulated as the sole ornament on the façade. Rather than acting as stilts on which the house sits, the columns extend from the ground floor up to the roof and animate the elevations.
Formally, the house is a simple long gabled volume that has been split and shifted near its midpoint to avoid a large protected tree on the property. The house has four bedrooms, four-and-a-half bathrooms, a flex space, and large covered porches.
PLAN | LEVEL 00
PLAN | LEVEL 01
PLAN | LEVEL 02