Windflower Addition

Project Overview

Location: Woodland Park, Colorado Architect: Kingdom Design Group Type: Residential Addition, Existing Building Modification

The Windflower project combined a conventional addition scope with a more exploratory structural study: pushing the limits of what the existing building could accommodate and what the International Existing Building Code would allow.

The immediate scope was a new dining room addition and a covered exterior feature area with a fireplace: a common type of residential expansion in the mountain communities west of Colorado Springs. The more ambitious goal was transforming the existing great room by vaulting its ceiling to a full two-story height, dramatically changing the feel of the space.

New Dining Room and Exterior Fireplace Addition

The dining room addition required new foundations, floor framing, and a roof structure that connected cleanly to the existing home. The exterior fireplace feature added a covered outdoor living space and required a girder and post system to span the area and tie back to the existing steel framing within the building.

Connecting new framing to existing steel required careful field investigation to confirm the existing member sizes, connection conditions, and available bearing surfaces. New connections were designed to transfer vertical and lateral loads from the addition into the existing frame without overstressing the original members or requiring their replacement.

Great Room Ceiling Vault: IEBC Study

The more technically demanding element of this project was the feasibility study for vaulting the great room ceiling from its original flat or low-slope configuration to a full two-story exposed vault.

Removing a ceiling structure in an existing building is never straightforward. The existing ceiling framing (joists, collar ties, or a diaphragm) may be contributing to the lateral resistance of the building, carrying floor loads from above, or providing the only mechanism preventing the roof rafters from spreading the exterior walls outward.

Frontier conducted an exploratory structural study evaluating:

• What load-carrying and lateral functions the existing ceiling framing was performing
• Whether the roof structure could carry the required loads without the ceiling acting as a structural tie
• What new structural elements (ridge beam, knee wall, rafter upgrades, new connections) would be needed to vault the space safely
• Whether the scope of structural modifications triggered upgrade thresholds under the International Existing Building Code (IEBC) Work Area method

The study confirmed that the vault was achievable within the IEBC compliance path, and the resulting design gave the owner the dramatic two-story great room they envisioned without triggering a full seismic or lateral upgrade to the existing structure.

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