What is a hybrid home?
So what exactly is a hybrid home? The hybrid home is designed and built from a variety of delightful materials – for example, reclaimed wood, natural stone or exotic hardwoods. These mixed materials give to the each hybrid home its own unique character.
You love the beauty of wooden structures. You are drawn to the traditional look of records. There are some great decorative stones on your floor that would be perfect as a fireplace or pillar base. Barn wood siding would be nice for a mudroom. And you’re on the lookout for some exotic hardwoods for your floors.
How do you combine all these materials?
Your dream home could be a hybrid home – a custom log house that combines a number of building materials and building elements in the same structure, creating a home that exceeds the sum of its many parts.
There are many names for this type of house, including mountain architecture, natural elements, natural materials, wood and wood combination. Many companies offer this type of home as part of their repertoire and might call it something like a signature series.
Flexible style
In general, hybrid homes are those that include a great deal of traditional vaulted frame construction combined with more natural-looking materials, such as full wood walls, wood veneer, wood frame, or stonework. The fact that hybrid homes do such a wonderful job of combining different elements creates a wealth of wow factor – and increases your ability to customize and personalize your dream home. The possibilities offered by hybrid home building mean that people who may not have felt comfortable with any one flavor of home design can venture into a new architectural area. Instead of an all-timber or all-wood house, you can create a structure that mixes different shapes and reflects its natural surroundings.
Aesthetically, a hybrid house with a timber or log frame in only part of the house (perhaps outside or in certain interior spaces) can give a lighter, more transitional feel. Additionally, traditional hybrid home construction frees your design from some of the limitations of timber or wood frame geometry. “You may love the look of a log house, but there are the some issues with a full-log house you don’t need to have with a hybrid home,” says Erwin Loveland of Tennessee-based MossCreek Designs. For example, with a hybrid, you can put very large windows in the house without worrying too much about whether the window is the compromising the strength of the wall or how the logs are leveled.
Hybrid Homes: Room by Room
Tone material
The key to doing justice to all the elements in a hybrid home is using distinct materials in all the right places—and knowing when to stop. So, for example, in a large room, you might want to choose an exposed wood frame structure for the interior or elaborate roof truss work that creates plenty of visual interest. And to some extent, the master suites are getting more attention. Its ceilings are the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.
Kitchens
Kitchens are a prime place for traditional construction, giving you flat walls that can easily support cabinets and appliances. But by reinforcing your traditional masonry to support a little extra weight, you can add decorative woodwork on the ceiling, inlay on beams or reclaimed trim, giving the kitchen more architectural interest, warmth, and a sense of history, too.
Higher floors
Designers recommend keeping the traditional construction in children’s rooms or other areas that might be subjected to rough treatment. Rooms on the upper floor are more likely to have a flat roof that doesn’t leave much room for the timber framing the elements, Loveland notes. Kids can do things like the paint on the walls and add a few strokes here and there. It’s probably best to just use drywall for your kids’ bedroom walls, because it’s easier to fix than, say, strange or hard-to-harvest wood.
Outdoor rooms
However, outdoor rooms are a good place to put the traditional construction aside and let the natural elements of your hybrid take over. Log trellis add-ons are popular options for outdoor rooms, or use decorative veneer such as barn board on the walls inside and out to help transition between indoor and outdoor spaces.
As insurance, be sure to find a design professional who really understands the products the house will be built with, and can act as a good resource for finding particularly interesting materials. You can build a new dream home with all the amenities, and make it look like it’s been there forever. The trick is to get all the components working to give you that look,” Loveland explains. “What a high-quality hybrid home does so well is that it gives you the amenities of traditional construction, but with natural elements that make your dream home feel like it really belongs.”
Source: Hybrid Home
