The Deep Dive: A New Type of New Orleans Porch

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.

When New Orleans native Eric Roland told architect Nathan Fell that he could spend $50,000 to reconfigure a recently purchased two-family home just outside the Garden District, Fell remembers imagining that "a lot of architects would try to get rid of him." Yet Fell—who launched his eponymous studio in the Crescent City in 2019—also thought that Eric’s enthusiasm outshone the limited funds. "I knew immediately he was somebody I could work with," Fell says of the project featured in May/June’s "Budget Breakdown: Hate Your Gable-Sided Home? Shield It." "I try my best to work with people I share values with, and it was just so obvious that this person cared so deeply about design and detail that it was hard to say no."

"In black-and-white terms, the concept is a front porch addition," Fell says of the original brief. Eric’s purchase featured a slim two-story porch ascending to a gabled pediment, and the new homeowner recognized that expanding the porch could accommodate an external stair that eliminates the need for interior steps and frees up area inside the 2,500-square-foot building. Fell supported enlarging this transitional indoor/outdoor space, since bigger dimensions would offer more functionality and fill in the house’s anomalously large setback from the street. He also wondered whether the new composition could appear "kind of ambiguous, as if the front part of the building’s skin had been removed." 

In lieu of making a simply bigger porch, Fell conceived a new front elevation in which a screen of black-painted pine studs attaches to a frame of black steel posts and clear-stained cedar lumber. The architect likens the composition to an exoskeleton that not only hides the gable (much maligned by Eric) but also recasts the property in a more contemporary image. In a nod to history, Fell conceived a notch for each pine fin so that stacked studs would appear continuously vertical, like the balloon frames of 19th-century American houses. 

Openings between fins were largely dictated by code, and the arrangement lends a further ambiguity to the house’s image. At farther distances and oblique angles—the view from a car passing by, for instance—the fins give the impression of opacity, while proximity or a head-on view reveals the gaps. Meanwhile, the steel posts fasten via through bolts that penetrate cedar ledgers, anchoring the exoskeleton to the existing home’s masonry structure. The posts are founded on piles with spread footings, as well. "Rule of thumb around here is that an addition to a home on piles should have piles, too," Fell explains of preventing differential settling.

Fell’s exoskeleton concept also paved the way for Eric to realize his second goal for the project: fenestrating the front elevation of the second floor so that a glazed garage door borders the living room and porch. For one thing, the exoskeleton shades the garage door and prevents excessive thermal gain in the living room. For another, Fell observes, "That large of an opening would be less private without having a mass in front of it, but you can still see through it; you really don’t get this kind of semi-privacy in a [conventional] front porch with a blank wall behind it."

And while Eric had envisioned the garage door as a blurring of indoors and outdoors, Fell thinks of the garage door–exoskeleton combination as the environmental equivalent of welcome. When the habitable spaces come alive with a party, they beckon arriving guests to the action. In quieter moments, they invite neighbors to engage Eric in dialogue—"and frankly," Fell says, "people may think of New Orleans as having a certain aesthetic of porches and balconies, but ultimately the city’s identity is really about the use and function of these spaces. There’s a social aspect to the way people exist here."

Fell hopes that, by underscoring the difference between aesthetic and use, Eric’s project will change wider perceptions of New Orleans. "We don’t take for granted that we have wonderful, beautiful buildings here, some of which are sacred. Conversely, it’s not fair for people who don’t live here to think of New Orleans as entirely sacred, and that citizens and homeowners are just curators of a museum—and that doing something modern is somehow altering the fabric of the city in a negative way." The architect finds it more offensive to ape local architectural motifs without considering their underlying principles. "Our predecessors made their choices with a lot of meaning. To do something authentic here, now, is to ask yourself, ‘How are you engaging with materials that are available to you in 2023, breaking up a mass, or expressing structural forces?’ Answering those questions are more in keeping with actual meaning." 

We welcome your thoughts and illustrative projects. Reach out to pro@dwell.com.