We could not be happier to have Tricia Kendall on our team and to share her point of view with you. Tricia is a Massachusetts registered architect and is LEED accredited with a Building Design and Construction specialty. She received her Master in Architecture from Harvard University and has taught in the architecture program at several universities. Tricia loves solving architectural puzzles from the initial design concept through the final steps of construction to provide spaces that more perfectly fit the lives of contemporary families.
What drew you to architecture in the first place?
I always liked to build things. As a kid, I built with Legos with my brothers. Every project I did in grade school, when I could have a choice between writing a paper or building a model, I built a model.
I grew up in the Midwest, and now I love to go back and see the local forms in the architecture there—not only the farms, but the towns that grew up along the Mississippi River. They're filled with limestone warehouses and other limestone buildings. I really like and find value in those types of things.
What kind of design projects inspire you now? What's exciting?
Projects that combine old and new, past and present.
We do a lot of those projects here because there are so many older houses, and young modern families moving into the older houses. It’s exciting to explore how to combine the character and substance of these houses with the way we live in modern times because the way we live now is very different from the time the houses were constructed.
That kind of puzzle—bringing the past and present together—is what I enjoy the most.
How do you find the right style for any particular family or homeowner?
It isn’t about a style; the idea is to fit in the spaces the owners really need. A lot of the time, I think spaces have become overcomplicated.
In older houses, we sometimes look back to the original plan before past owners added a closet in the corner, or carved out a bathroom, or put another little addition on it.
When you look at the original houses, they were quite simple, and the spaces were very defined. A room was a square, or a square with a bay window, or a rectangle. They didn't get overly complicated.
Rooms today also aren't as specific as they used to be. Traditionally, a living room, a parlor, or a dining room would be very precisely defined. Today, we like our spaces to flow together more, and we use rooms in a multipurpose way.
Sometimes working on these houses is a matter of simplifying them back down to where they were originally, but in a more generous way. For instance, the openings between small, simple spaces can become larger so people can pass more easily between rooms.
Sometimes the design is actually going almost backwards and taking away the things that disrupted the simple spaces of the house, such as taking out a bathroom or closet that was just kind of stuck in there, or removing a later addition that just doesn’t fit. The process lets you find more clarity of space; it makes the home simpler and more open so it has a better flow.
Give me some examples of this approach in New England homes.
We worked on a home recently that, conceptually, I began to think of as a long loaf of bread. It had all the typical functions—kitchen, dining room, mudroom, entry area, laundry area—together in a long space. The connections between them, however, were very confusing; it was just a jumble of spaces put together.
We then worked to define each area better and to give more clarity to the layout. We marked out an entry zone (door and mudroom), a service zone (bathroom, laundry, and pantry), a dining zone, and a cooking zone (kitchen). Each zone was a “slice” of the same house (loaf of bread), but each slice was a different thickness depending on its function and importance.
We marked these different areas with thresholds, so you would understand that you're crossing from one zone into another, even though it's still a very open flow of space.
We reflected that idea on the exterior as well, using windows or posts or other materials. From the outside, you get an idea that the space behind the wall is divided into different uses. Then, it doesn’t look like it’s all one big room behind the wall; it doesn't look so anonymous.
Another recent project was an old 1880s barn on the Cape.
The homeowners built a new home a couple of years ago, but they also have an old horse barn on the property, and they wanted to repurpose it as an accessory building for guests. The top floor become a guest suite and the lower floor has both a space to store the owner's boat and an entertainment space. We needed to make the renovated barn compliment the new house which was just a few feet away.
The fun thing about working inside of a post-and-beam barn (I grew up surrounded by farms), is that barns are purely functional in their original design. If they needed an opening in a specific spot, they put the opening there—it didn't matter if it was symmetrical or whatever. Using the same strategy for this renovation resulted in a more fun layout, something a little bit looser than what we typically do on houses.
How do you make sure you're delivering what the homeowner really needs and wants?
When I started out in architecture, I worked for a high-end residential firm. It was great and my colleagues there were like my family as I learned how to do the work. It was fun because there were usually generous funds to work with.
Today, I'm a homeowner myself, and a wife, and a mother, and a dog owner. All the things I do with my own home have a definite budget! That’s a different type of experience.
I feel one of the things I have to offer is I can take the typical homeowner's ideas—what they want and need for just a normal growing family—and make it something they can reach at their own budget or price point. Some things obviously cost money; the details and material choices you make or the square footage you're adding, can affect the price a lot. But having the right clarity and movement of space in the design, that doesn't have a price tag on it. It just works.