Custom Build Residence

Project Overview

Location: Woodland Park, Colorado Contractor: Kessler Inc. Type: Custom Residential, New Construction

This two-story custom residence in Woodland Park sits at an elevation where wind is not a secondary consideration; it is a primary design driver. The combination of a vaulted great room ceiling and an open loft created architectural conditions that required wind engineering beyond what prescriptive residential code provisions typically anticipate.

Non-Traditional Wind Design

Woodland Park and the surrounding Teller County communities sit at elevations between 8,000 and 9,000 feet in a terrain environment that channels and amplifies wind relative to lower-elevation Front Range communities. The ASCE 7 design wind speed for this area is elevated, and the exposure category for a site on the open terrain typical of Woodland Park compounds the pressure demands on the structure.

The vaulted great room and the open loft created two specific wind design challenges that standard prescriptive framing tables don’t address:

Loft Bracing: An open loft (a partial floor level open to the space below) creates a horizontal diaphragm with one open edge. Without the full enclosure of a conventional floor diaphragm, the loft must be explicitly braced to transfer wind-induced in-plane forces to the shear walls below. Frontier designed the loft framing and its connections to function as a partial diaphragm with defined chord and collector members, ensuring the wind load path was complete despite the open geometry.

Wind Girts for the Vaulted Great Room: In a room with a vaulted ceiling, the exterior walls extend to the full height of the vault (potentially 20 feet or more). Tall walls carry significantly more wind pressure than standard 8- or 9-foot walls, and the stud sizes required to span those heights in bending are larger than standard lumber. Frontier designed horizontal wind girts (intermediate horizontal framing members) to break up the tall wall height into manageable spans, allowing standard framing members to carry the wind load at intermediate points rather than requiring oversized studs spanning the full vault height.

Architectural Features

Beyond the wind design, the residence features a conventional two-story layout with the great room as its social core. The vaulted ceiling and loft were the owner’s centerpiece features, and the structural system was designed to support those features while remaining invisible in the finished space: no exposed beams, knee walls, or bracing visible to the occupant.

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