Exterior Design- Sunnybrook Farm, a Georgian, Palladian, Classic Revival home



Sunnybrook Farm - It is stone-textured cream-color house, but photographs white! Front and back opening.

Exterior - rear (unfinished) with terrace. Attic has garret windows and an artist studio

The interior of the main house, Christmas 2011

See the entries for Sunnybrook Farm in the Table of Contents listing. There is quite a bit of information and many pictures there, plus the funny (?) story about how three beginners leaped into this complex build!

I love Georgian and Palladian design so when we wanted a specific style, this was the winner. Since this was the only house we thought we would build, I filled it with everything I wanted. As a result, it is a front and back opening, 2-rooms deep, 25+ room house with separate wing sections.

It is made from 3/8 inch Baltic Birch plywood. It is almost completely electrified and runs off four 40 watt transformers. It sits on a custom-built movable 4 foot by 8 foot table with plenty of storage underneath. ...

Movable table supporting the house, with lots of storage underneath. The large window on the side of the house is part of the interior garden room.

We built it without knowing how to do more than half the things we wanted in the house. The only thing we were sure about was the little people who would live in it! The build had a number of discouraging moments and we stopped a couple of times.

The house is a cream-color stone texture, but always photographs as white! I was not going to have a monochromatic exterior, but as the size and the complexity of the house became apparent, I decided that cream plus touches of white was all the house could take!

The Exterior Design – Front:
We worked from scale drawings of the exterior and interior of the house. The interior went fairly well, except for me changing my mind about the size of the rooms. (Interior design and its trials are in a future post.) I don’t have many photos of the early days. I think that we were so busy building and "unbuilding" that we hadn’t the energy to take pictures!

Once we had the shell of the house built, it was time to jump into the really deep water.

Front Steps and Portico:

The Front Steps:

We wanted gracious steps. Unfortunately, it took us three complete builds of the steps to get it right—gracious low-rising steps with one 90 degree turn to get to the porch. Sigh. Andrew gets the credit for getting the steps right.  He figured out the right height of the risers and the right deep of the tread to have elegant steps. It took us so to come up with this, that everything else was finished!

I can't find the picture of the first try. This is the second try, not too bad but still too steep. (Ignore the dowels as "columns".)



Final version (thanks to Andrew)!

The Pediment:
I looked at many pictures until I understood the pieces that were needed. Then we cut the wood and built the basic pediment. This went fairly smoothly. I added the finishing touches as we went along throughout the build.

The finished pediment.

The Columns (Trouble with a capital “T”):
Now that we had steps, a porch, and a pediment, we ran into the biggest problem--they were ready for the columns that we did not know how to do! The 22 inch columns had to be tapered! We tried a number of fruitless schemes until one day, inspiration struck-- stair spindles! We had already decided on Doric columns, we just needed plain, tapered columns.

Thus off to Home Depot, our do-it yourself center, to buy spindles. We cut out the appropriate mid-section, et voila, we had it! We just had to add some column “trim” and the railings. Oh, so easy! Actually, no … but at least we had a plan!

Doric columns, finally!

The Exterior Design- The Rear Terrace:
The living, dining, and foyer have doors opening to the terrace. The terrace was fairly easy to build and fun! It had to be built in sections since the living and dining room doors open, thus it has to be moved out of the way. The house opening front and back brought no end of problems and I think that I should have only had back opening doors where there is a rear room.

Close-up of terrace (unfinished)

Terrace. looking from other direction. It goes across the entire main house.

The railings (local shop, vendor unknown) are painted that wonderful dark green that the Georgians loved because it was so expensive and showed their wealth! The terrace and steps are painted with a stone-textured paint but the terrace floor is cut-up vinyl floor tiles from Home Depot.

The terrace area is unfinished.

This really was, and still is, fun to do.

Exterior: Other Comments:
The rest of the exterior was just a lot of time-consuming buying, cutting, painting, and gluing all manner of trim. The fancy trim is from Unique Miniatures and Handley House (Classics), and the “plain” trim is just strip wood. The front balcony railings are Dolls’ House Emporium fencing painted cream color.

The roof slates are just cut-up vinyl flooring tiles from Home Depot!

I love to landscape all our houses. I find it fun, easy, and relaxing! Of course, I can't wait to get this house finished!

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In the next post, I will discuss the trials and tribulations of building Palladian windows and doors for the main rooms of the house. Or ... “How to spend a lot of money and time and be frustrated”. (Did I say that we hadn’t a clue as to what we jumped into, but getting the message fast?)