Single-Family Home
Johnsen Schmaling’s CLT House Is an Elegant Display of Mass Timber’s Beauty
The architects at Milwaukee-based Johnsen Schmaling rarely refer to their single-family residences by their clients’ names. An early work was called the Camouflage House after its stealthy profile and finishes on a lakefront site. The Flex House is named for its ability to change uses over time. The Kettle Moraine House and the Escarpment House refer to their sites. But their new CLT House is the first to be named for its structural material. Located on the south shore of a small lake in Hubertus, Wisconsin, the architects believe the house is one of the first homes in the Midwest to employ cross-laminated timber.
Brian Johnsen and Sebastian Schmaling, the firm’s partners, became interested in CLT and its applications about a decade and a half ago. “We started teaching a CLT studio at [the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee] and thought, ‘It would be really cool to do a CLT building here in Wisconsin,’ and tried on multiple occasions to see if it would make sense,” Schmaling says.
CLT House
CLT House
Things finally started to make sense when a Milwaukee doctor engaged the partners to design a house 20 miles northwest of the city. At just 1,380 square feet, the single-story home is quite small, with a kitchen, dining room, living room, and two bedrooms with a bath. “This program is so simple and the building is small, which could help us to minimize the different types of [CLT] panels we would use and make it economically feasible,” Schmaling says.
Conceived as a pavilion in the landscape, it spans the width of the lot from east to west. With the entrance on the south façade and the lake to the north, the home’s glassy porosity allows lake views through the house itself. Circulation between individual spaces is aligned to the south side of the house to enhance each room’s view of the lake. A single CLT roof structure spans the entire house, including a garage and covered carport at the west end.
CLT House
CLT House
An Iconic Reveal
The structure is simple: glulam columns and beams support the CLT roof deck. The pine wood is exposed wherever possible and is slightly whitewashed with a sealer and a hint of white pigment. “We just love the idea of exposing the structural system on the outside and realized that doing that gives us this immediate iconic appearance,” Schmaling says.
And the CLT roof deck allowed the architects to achieve an extraordinarily thin roof edge. “We like things to be thin and elegant,” Schmaling says. The exposed edge is just 4-1/8 inches thick—the dimension of the CLT deck. Since both north and south sides have large cantilevered overhangs, roof insulation could be set back from the edge and tapered to maintain the thin profile.
CLT House
CLT House
While always concerned about the economics of CLT, Schmaling believes the project was similar in cost to a conventionally wood-framed house. Any higher material costs were offset by lower labor costs due to the precision of fabrication and speed of construction. “These panels come and if you build everything that needs to be site-built correctly, they fit perfectly,” he says.
Schmaling sees future opportunities surrounding CLT, noting that Milwaukee has the tallest mass timber skyscraper in the world, Ascent. “But there’s not a lot in our world of small practitioners where CLT is being used,” he says. He hopes that CLT House will encourage others to consider the material for other similarly scaled projects. “If you are a smart contractor, you know that eventually this will be a real thing in the market,” he says. “And I think if you can position yourself early on as one that has done one and knows how to deal with that, I think that will be a great marketing tool.”
CLT House
CLT House
Project Details
- Project:
- CLT House
- Architect
- Location:
- Milwaukee, WI
- Products Used:
- Size:
- 1,380 square feet
