sketch book - tower

This is a post that I started a couple of years ago and it never got to the stage of being published.  It describes how the concept of the tower came to be.

In one of the early plans the house consisted of a main floor with a walkout basement and a separate master bedroom suite.  The main floor was the great room and the lower level was the guest bedroom suite.  The lower level was accessed by a stairwell on the east side of the house.  This stairwell also served as the front entry way.  At the time I was thinking of a "karesansui" Japanese dry landscape garden for the lower level of the stairwell... the idea of using it for a koi pond hadn't occurred to me yet.

That plan was dashed during the following summer when we rented an excavator and discovered rock right below the surface of the ground.  We would have had to blast about 2 feet of rock to make our plan work... of course friends thought that was a GREAT idea... they were talking about setting up sofas, drinking beer, etc. and watching the blast.

The plans changed but we really liked the idea of the tower. 

The plans continued to evolve as we tried to listen to what the property was telling us about the design of our house.  The stairwell became a tower at some point, taking some cues from the fire towers and Harney Peak castle in the Black Hills.

Above is an early sketch of the tower.  The tower floor was dry and provided access to the crawlspace.  When we figured out that that door to the crawlspace would only be about three feet tall we abandoned that idea.  We had another interior space in the house that was going to be the koi pond and during one of the designs to reduce the area of the house, the koi pond found its way to the bottom of the entry tower.

There were a couple of other design refinements that we have gone thru and below is a "sketch up" 3D drawing that shows what we are going to build.

The box under the tower is below the ground level - this will be the fish pond.  Access to the tower "keep" will be via a stairway, part of which will swing up similar to a fire escape.  The stairs will be fitted into a timber frame structure that kind of reminds me of the style of timber framing used for mining.