Family's Quonset Hut ADU | Mind-Blowing Home The World Needs Now

The Arch is one of these really ancient and primary architectural forms that we are used to seeing in these cathedrals or temples. The Arch is also one of the strongest structural forms. It has just immense seismic snow and wind loads, so you'll see Hurricane 4 winds come through areas in the south and the only structures that are standing will be a Quonset hut. Resiliency architecture I think is going to be something that we're all talking about in the coming decades. I think it's something that we should all be considering top of mind. I mean, does wood frame and wood board homes make sense? What are we building for? We have, I think, some coming environmental challenges that we're going to need to be designing and preparing for. Hi, I'm Marie Saldivar, owner and founder of Steel Hut, and I'm standing in front of our Steel Hut here in Sisters, Oregon. Let me introduce you to our Quonset hut. If you've never seen one before, this is 20 by 40 by 22 feet tall. It's a proof of concept structure for our company Steel Hut and a wonderful mother-in-law suite. Quonset hut is a series of arched pre-engineered panels. You might be familiar with applications like airplane hangers, agricultural storage, bunkers. We're using them in a residential application. The panels are galvanized steel, 100% recycled steel with a galluvalum coating, which means it's never going to rust. You never have to paint it. You never have to re-roof. This Quonset hut is sitting on a two-foot concrete stem wall. We get a lot of snow here in Sisters, so we're just keeping all of that snow melt off of that perforation point at the foundation. We also have three dormered windows on each side, but they're sitting at about six feet high, so you're just getting a lot of that ambient tree height light coming in, but it keeps it feel secluded and private. So you might be thinking this is a pretty bunker-ish looking structure, but I promise you you're going to be surprised. Let's go and take a look. Hi, welcome inside to our lofted 1,200 square foot Steel Hut. With this Steel Hut build, the goal was to really use a huge elevated height to create a luxurious living space on a small footprint. Ceilings are 22 feet tall, so both downstairs and upstairs in the loft we're getting 11-foot ceilings, except for this kind of wow entrance moment where you have a full vaulted 22 feet above you. When we chose the site on this parcel, this is our family home, and we were looking to site a guest house. It's really in the trees, but there's beautiful open manzanita, wonderful light quality, and I think anytime you're building something that's successful, you really are relating that architecture to the environment and the site. So we wanted to take full advantage by using a large triple stacking slider as much glass that can open to create just a lovely indoor-outdoor living space, especially in our central Oregon summers where you just really want to take advantage of being outside. We have two really cozy seating areas in the hut. So we have our captains chairs and ottoman oriented around this lovely morso wood stove, which in the winter times is the place that you want to be, and we also have a nice seating area upstairs in the loft. One of the feedbacks that I get when we host people here, we host my mother-in-law and father-in-law here, especially when the baby was born, is that the place just feels super serene and really calm, and I think a lot of that is the natural light and the environment and the snippets of treetops that you're seeing in all of these windows, but I think it's also just the sound quality in here is wonderful. We have R30 closed cell spray foam in all of the arched and wall panels, and it's tight, and it's not only super efficient from a heating and cooling perspective, it also just creates a really like cozy acoustic environment. One of the challenges working within this building system, kind of this austere steel exterior, is how do we bring in a lot of warmth and materiality inside? So it was important to me to have these exposed Doug fir glulam beams that are actually supporting the second floor structure, but also choosing lots of warm tones for the door and window package. Our custom banister here, which is all in vertical grain hemlock, it's just kind of in chorus with wonderful warmth in the wood tones that's in contrast with some of these non-precious materials like a full concrete polished floor. I'm a gardening newbie, which is both exciting and a little intimidating. I learned from Ron Finley's class on Masterclass that gardening is both a science and an art. 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So you'll notice walking into the dining and kitchen area that the ceiling does drop, but it's still this kind of huge elevated 11 foot tall ceiling with just a generous amount of space. We have a seven foot long table here which creates so much flexible use for gathering, dining, working from home, just kind of a hub. So right over here we have this custom sideboard that is also matching with our custom kitchen cabinets. A friend of ours here and sisters made these for us and this is radiata plywood off the shelves of Home Depot. This is like the most accessible, non-precious, non-stuffy material that you can access. I think that that really relates with the Quonset Hut and its history in general. It's really a proletariat utility-based structure, much like this radiata plywood. It's all about really elevating and putting it within a new context. And behind me is the kitchenette. Again, the radiata ply book-ended custom cabinetry, which is so beautiful. And this was kind of a moment that I wanted to contrast with a more traditional material. So we have Carrara marble sitting on top of what is maybe a non-traditional cabinet, but I think that it really, really works visually and I think it's kind of a fun conversation about materiality. This is a generous L-shaped kitchen. We, because of county zoning, cannot have a cooktop. This is just functioning as a mother-in-law suite, but there is ample space that you could definitely put a full range, anything that you really wanted to do in this kitchenette. There's plenty of space. So this whole space is heated and cooled by two cassette head mini split system that's running off of one pump. One is located here in the kitchen, one is upstairs. They are more than efficient to heat and cool this entire space. Sometimes you just never really know until you get to the end stages of a building project. Something about the orientation and also just how efficient and tight the insulation is on this building. This is like one of the coolest places to be in the summertime, especially with this concrete floor. We really don't use the AC option much on the mini splits at all. Life is really, really full right now. We have a one and a half year old. I'm a stay-at-home mom, but I'm also involved in selling real estate in Central Oregon. And I'm also the sole point person for Steel Hut, our design build company. Initially, we didn't start building Quonset Huts because it was about the architecture. It was really about having agency over creating space and doing it on a super shoestring budget, which is how we came to the Quonset building system in the first place. Living down in Joshua Tree area, trying to find an economic way to build 1,500 square feet for artist studio and living space, and we found this building system and were able to accomplish that for like $50,000. Our company is called Steel Hut, but specifically this building system, these are Quonset Huts, which is a term founded in World War II. These buildings originated as like a quick deployment, flat pack bunker system that could be sent overseas. Quonset Point, New Jersey is where these were manufactured, these steel buildings. So that's where the name originates. We've seen them, obviously, it's kind of this ubiquitous structure that we see across America. They're used for farm use buildings, they're airplane hangers, they're function driven, kind of non-residential concept structures. And we're not the only ones, but we're definitely one of the few people that are incorporating them and putting them in a residential context. They're pre-engineered panels that all come flat packed. We use a company called Steel Master Buildings, so we're able to design the space and then integrate with their structural engineers, and they just send, this entire building came flat packed on one pallet. So it's kind of an amazing opportunity for remote areas building, fast deployment architecture. Some of the other benefits are they're 100% recycled steel, so it's a continuously renewable resource. The benefit of steel is that they're fire resistant, so you'll see that the structure is erected in a super wooded treed area. We have fire on our mines, especially over the last decade in the west, we're all experiencing a level of fire risk or fire danger. From there it's like, okay, how do we use within the framework of this building system, how do we really create the most beautiful use of space and light and volume and structure within that arched envelope of the Quonset hut. As far as livability, this kind of sun-drenched back patio that's facing west is super lovely to sit on and warm up. Our parcel abuts all national forests, so it's just this really lovely private secluded and sunny space to be. And over here is the bathroom, which for me was just an excuse to order all of this gorgeous handmade blue tile. For an efficient footprint home, this is a pretty spacious full bath, large shower. I wanted to incorporate from a design perspective some traditional elements that you wouldn't necessarily expect, so a pedestal sink, some of this lovely handmade tile. For me, it's an aesthetic decision to bring in the warmth of these beams in this space. It's also maybe part of my design ethos, which is don't hide what the thing is. For storage, we have a medicine cabinet here above the pedestal sink, and this is our utility closet. It's a mess, so I'm not going to show you it, but there's a hot water heater in there, all of our sub panels, some of our mechanical room. But it does give us additional storage options for the living space. As we're headed upstairs, it might be worth mentioning that originally this structure was designed around a spiral staircase, just because they're a great space-saving tool. But as we got further into the design process, I realized that they're not necessarily what I want my mother-in-law or father-in-law using in the middle of the night to get downstairs. This is a custom, super efficient staircase that not only adds, I think, more visual interest than what the spiral staircase would have done, but it also creates an opportunity for storage. So we have this kind of wraparound Harry Potter closet that is good for keeping all kinds of miscellaneous. Let's head upstairs. Here we are upstairs in this very generous 500 square foot loft. It's both a bedroom and kind of den. This is one of the cozier places to curl up with a book. I also call it the treehouse, because if you notice, you've got kind of these treetop views through the three-pane window there. It's also an amazing place to kind of witness and be in awe of the arch. Sometimes lofts don't feel like you have this really division or separation of space. That is not the case up here. You just feel like you're in a fully different part of the structure, and at 20 feet in the air, we're only seeing like the middle of these trees. So it gives you kind of a good understanding of what the landscape is around us. So a silly kind of side note or detail, but having a TV on wheels, you can watch it from bed or you can watch it from the couch. Very versatile space up here. The loft is creating this extremely peaceful, cozy atmosphere for a bedroom, but it really feels so expansive. So from the orientation of sleeping here, you're looking out kind of at the whole structure. The knee wall is not delineating that space. It feels very wide open. We, in the last two years, decided to scale Steel Hut in a way where we're now producing and selling architectural drawing sets, so that we could have a larger impact on the market, so that people from all over the country, also all over the world, can order our design packets and the corresponding building set from Steel Master Buildings. So I knew that that was the direction that I wanted to go, just because we were getting a lot of interest from people outside of our region. So we worked with Skylab Architecture out of Portland. It took us about a year and a half to come up with three different models that are also pre-engineered with Steel Master components, and those models are the Jackrabbit, the A-Frame, and the Courtyard House. All three are very different forms within the Quonset Hut, and they're all different sizes and different applications for use. So the Jackrabbits are really more of an ADU or a micro cabin, and then it graduates in size up to the Courtyard House. The Courtyard House is fun in that there's three different modules, but you can build them all at once, or you can build them as life permits, as savings permits, so it is modular in that respect. While this building system is definitely more economical, it's still expensive to build. The structure that we're sitting in now, the cheapest part of these building systems are the actual shell itself. It's all of the on-site build that adds up. Concrete work, flat work, doors and window packages, framing, all of that. It does add up, but we were able to finish this structure, which does have some considerably high-end finishes, for $275 a square foot. So we're almost half of where custom builds start in Central Oregon, and that's really competitive, and that's really exciting. So one of the tenets of this business model, of this building system, is creating opportunities for people to have elevated design homes at a price point that otherwise isn't really affordable, and that is included too in our architectural drawing set. So we hired a very awarded architecture firm, which it did take considerable resources for them to go through this process with us, but we're offering architectural drawings on our website from $5,000 for our smallest model. Our plan sets are pre-engineered and pre-designed in a way that meets international building code. It alleviates a lot of time and a lot of financial investment when you purchase these from us, but it still does take some local coordination with a structural engineer or a general contractor, whoever's going to help you navigate that permitting process. We're about to build our second big project down in the Mojave Southern California desert, so that's another thing. We've built these buildings in environments that are really stress testing. I mean, really high daily temperatures, really big temperature swings, lots of exposure. These are really resilient structures. Form follows function on these structures, but the form is stunning. They're beautiful. One of the biggest surprises is the contrast and tension between the exterior of these structures, which look kind of bunker-ish. They're these big, impressive steel structures that we don't necessarily compute with warm, homey environments, and then you open the door and you're inside these huge cathedral ceilings. The interior spaces are so stunning. Thanks for stopping by Tiny House Expedition. I'm Alexis, and I'm Christian, and this is our DIY tiny house on our homestead in Oregon. Looking for more tiny inspiration? Watch these videos. But if you're looking for something specific, visit our channel homepage to browse tiny homes by category. And don't forget to subscribe. Hope to see you soon.