Peabody Architects

A Sunroom that Upgrades the Whole House

This client came to us with a seemingly simple request: a sunroom. But they also had a host of energy and design issues they wanted us to address. On the energy side, they wanted to upgrade their home’s mechanical system, making the home comfortable and energy efficient. On the design side, they wanted their new room to flow into the garden. They also wanted to improve the interior flow of their small, Cape Cod home, opening the kitchen to the living room, and connecting it to the sunroom.

To meet all of these needs, we designed a small, south facing sunroom on the back of the house. It connects to a porch, which opens to the yard and provides covered access to the existing garage. A roof deck, accessible from a second-floor library sits atop the entire addition. To improve the home’s flow, we took a small breakfast room and converted it to a passage between the kitchen and the living room. The clients now eat breakfast in their sunroom. The sunroom has generous openings to the living room and passage, filling the house with light.

Making the house energy efficient and comfortable affected the design in a number of ways. The sunroom is built with a roof overhang to protect the windows from the blazing summer sun. This roof overhang is also a decorative element, knitting the sunroom to the existing house. The new sunroom is built on a concrete slab, with radiant floor, in-slab heat. In addition, through passive solar techniques, the south facing windows allow the limestone covered concrete slab to store heat generated from the winter sun, reducing the home’s heating loads. The mechanical system for the whole house was upgraded and the house was zoned, with separate controls for the upstairs, the downstairs, and the sunroom. The heat for each of these zones is powered by a single, energy efficient boiler that runs the radiant floor heating system. Spray foam insulation at the sunroom makes the addition air-tight. Low maintenance exterior materials include cementitious siding, brick, and aluminum clad windows.