CAHH Design Review Guidelines
Section II –Standards of Original Design

Hollin Hills houses have distinctive features that define the character of our community and set it apart from other developments. The character defining features for any house include the site, plan arrangements, facade designs, windows and doors, roofs, and materials. By examining these features on Hollin Hills homes, you can begin to see similar features appearing again and again. The unique character of Hollin Hills is defined by our collective perception of these features. An important fact to remember is that the various designs for Hollin Hills homes evolved over the twenty year construction history of the community. There are basic features common to all Hollin Hills houses, but there are variations in the way the elements fit together. The earliest homes were simple rectangular and split level plans with low-slope gable roofs. Some of the split levels had low slope shed roofs. Later, square plans with flat roofs were added as well as butterfly roofs on existing plans. Later homes of all plan types were constructed from standardized modular wall panels, further giving design cohesiveness to the community. Thus, any evaluation of the "harmony and conformity" of proposed changes to a Hollin Hills home must take into account both the design similarities and the design dissimilarities that have existed in our community from the beginning. Design features that occur, or, conversely, do not occur, in a significant percentage of Hollin Hills homes are of primary importance in evaluating proposed changes.

SITING Hollin Hills houses are sited to take advantage of the topography and sun. They do not site in orderly rows, each parallel to the street. The topography was not well suited to subdivision development, placing extra demands on the developer, his architects and landscape architects. Certain house plans evolved, for instance, in response to the topography to allow a minimum of regrading in order to retain a natural appearance. Views from our homes "borrow" vistas from adjacent yards, making our yards appear more spacious. Driveways were gravel to reduce their visual impact. The plantings are lush and mature, a benefit of living in thirty year old homes. There is variety in the placement of the different house plans, further diminishing the similarities to other subdivisions. Hollin Hills is distinctly different from other subdivisions, whether one is driving through or flying overhead. That distinctiveness is an important benchmark in evaluating proposed changes.

PLAN ARRANGEMENT The plan arrangements are "open" with the public spaces flowing into one another rather than always being separated by doors. In many homes you can walk from the kitchen through the dining rooms and into the living room without passing through a door. The bed and bathrooms, by contrast, all have doors for privacy. The spaces requiring water - bathrooms, kitchens, washing machines, water heaters - are clustered together in utility cores to minimize the plumbing required to serve them. Frequently, the utility spaces are located in the center of the house, where skylights substitute for bathroom windows and a roof monitor contains the furnace flue and whole house fan. While interior changes are not considered in reviewing plans, owners should understand that interior arrangements are invariably reflected in the window and door pattern. One cannot plan the interior of a proposed addition without considering the size and placement of exterior openings.

BUILDING SCALE, FORM AND ROOFLINE Hollin Hills houses are small scale, in keeping with typical house sizes in the 1950s. They take the form of rectangular boxes that sit lightly in the landscape. They are neither heavy nor imposing. The large windows give the houses an open and transparent quality, literally allowing one to look through them.

Garages, which by their very nature are not light or transparent, originally were virtually unknown. Carports, also not original, have been a successful compromise that provides shelter from the elements while maintaining a light an open character. The rooflines provide a strong horizontal emphasis that, especially in the single story plans, make our homes seem to hug the ground.

EXTERIOR WALLS Hollin Hills houses are very simply detailed. There are no brackets or cornices or elaborate moldings around window or door frames. The resulting clean, uncluttered lines are characteristic of the entire community. The walls of Hollin Hills houses are unornamented, planar surfaces with tall, rectangular openings. Early plans gave little indication on the exterior of interior partitions. The small, atypical windows in the bathrooms hinted at the function of the room inside for instance, but there was no exterior manifestation of the placement of interior partitions. Later plans utilized modular wall panels, manufactured on site, that were twelve feet long, most commonly in a window panel-window arrangement. Interior partitions were invariably placed to coincide with the joint between adjacent modular panels, making a strong correlation between the interior plan and exterior fenestration. The facades are primarily wood with used brick fireplace walls and some used brick or concrete block panels without windows. The fireplace walls and masonry panels serve a secondary function of providing bracing against lateral (wind) loads. The short wing walls at the fireplace end of the first floor of some two story homes serve the same purpose. Foundation walls, where they are visible above ground are generally concrete block. What have become known as Hollin Hills windows are a fixed upper light of plate glass with a lower operable sash, both set in thin (two inch wide) wooden frames or muntins. They are approximately three feet wide by eight feet high. Some plans use banks of these windows, actually using the muntins for structural support of the roof. Where banks of windows are used on the first floor of two story houses, the muntin width is increased to three inches to support the extra weight of the second Key elements of the esthetic design of Hollin Hills windows are the thin profile of the frames and muntins and the fixed upper and operable lower sash.

WINDOWS AND DOORS The windows are universally large, most frequently with a large fixed upper sash and a lower, operable sash. The upper sash are glazed with a single thickness of plate glass. The operable sash is approximately 25" high, although some window walls have taller lower sash to line up with the sill height of the kitchen windows. The lower sash were either steel casement windows (early) or steel awning windows (later). The switch to awning windows removed the vertical bar from the center of the lower sash, giving the windows a cleaner design. A key aspect of the window design is that the frames are unusually thin and unobtrusive. The rabbeted wooden frames are just two inches wide, while the steel lower sash only project in 1-1/4” from the wooden frames, minimizing the change in the Window profile. Exterior doors are flush, without panels or small glass lights. Where glass doors are used, they are either one full size glass opening or two, with the horizontal cross bar the same size as and aligned with the cross bat in adjacent windows.

ROOFS Hollin Hills roofs are either low-slope or flat. The low-slope roofs are most commonly gable roofs with some butterfly and shed roofs. Gutters, if any, are simply rectangular box gutters that seem to be a part of the roof edge rather than attached ornament. The roofs typically have large overhangs that provide shade for our large windows in the summer but allow the low winter sun to penetrate deeply into our homes. A second important feature of the overhangs is to keep rainwater off our wooden walls, prolonging their lives. The large overhangs are supported by thin outriggers, 2” by 3” extensions of the roof joists, that allow the roof edge to appear to thing and light. The full structural thickness of the roof is this hidden. Compare the size of the space above both the inside and outside of a Hollin Hills window to see the difference. Not all house plans have large overhangs, however. The square, flat roof plans have no overhangs, making them more susceptible to damage from splashed water and to heat gains from the summer sun. The original built-up roofs were asphalt, felt and slag/cinders with few penetrations such as skylights.

MATERIALS AND COLOR The most common exterior material is painted wood: tongue-and-groove siding (vertical butted boards), T-1-11 panels (plywood with grooves cut every 4"), and some clapboard, wood window and door frames that are also structural, solid panel wood doors, etc. The original palette of exterior colors were earth tones in keeping with the setting. Interestingly, interior colors were similar: warm gray, gray-brown, deep brown, clay red, black, gray-green and cadmium yellow. Trim, window and door frames, eaves and soffitts, was white. The white trim around the windows provided a seemingly unbroken plane from the interior to the exterior, further minimizing the window detail. The lack of ornament is another distinguishing characteristic. Instead of applied ornament, the texture of the building elements gives variety to the various planar surfaces as in the used brick and painted concrete block panel walls and used brick fireplaces, the regular pattern of t -1-11 or clapboard siding, and the gravelly texture of the built-up roofs. Exterior hardware was simple and modern, following the overall design philosophy.