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When Susan and Rick Moreland were looking to build a new house in Baton Rouge, they had difficulty finding examples in the area to show their architect. Susan says that even returning to her fairly traditional home country of Ireland, she would see “really neat, cool, modern houses and such.”

“It’s hard when you’re in a city and you don’t have any role models,” she says.

They found a handful of local role models in Lowe’s [for its concrete floor], the Shaw Center for the Arts [for the design of museum spaces] and the David Baird-designed home/office on Christian Street [for its storefront windows].

Architects Trina and Dwayne Carruth designed their contemporary Baton Rouge home. Dwayne says their company, Front Door Designs, is picking up more and more contemporary work, with roughly half of their current projects having a contemporary feel.

“There’s no question it’s turning around,” he says.

As more contemporary and modern homes slowly start to dot the landscape, we’ve spotlighted three in our area that can help serve as role models for architecture appreciators and future dreamers alike:

MOVING PURPOSE

Owner: Susan and Rick Moreland

Subdivision: McCall Place

Architect: Catovic Hughes Design

Builder: David Hayden

Move-in: 2005

Square footage: 2,150

Materials: Galvanized aluminum, ipe, stucco, steel, HardiePlank

‘We love talking about it,” Susan Moreland says of her home. “It’s like talking about your child.” After raising two boys into adulthood from their University Hills nest, Susan and Rick Moreland [Susan more so than Rick] started toying with the idea of moving, but not without a caveat or two. The new house would have to be different, interesting and worth the trouble of moving and building.

“It was a neat process. I’m really glad we did it, but I wouldn’t do it again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Susan says.

They bought the lot and sat on it a few years before securing an architect and starting on plans. The architects, Michael Hughes and his wife, Selma Catovic, asked the couple to describe ideal spaces in words as well as provide samples of houses and art they liked. The result, more or less, is two sunlight-flooded, C-shaped shotguns stacked upon one another, creating a playground for the eyes.

“Either you’re seeing outside or, in certain parts of the room, you can see a long way,” Rick says.

The strategically placed windows can be thanked for that, as well as the blurred lines and illusions between indoors and outdoors. A yellow-paneled shelving and storage space in the dining room appears to start inside and wrap outdoors, with the windows slicing through. The same effect is achieved along the living room/staircase wall with the ipe wood slates from outside morphing and extending into the interior white wall. Underfoot, the house’s concrete indoor floor, though slightly stained, is the same slab as the exterior concrete.

Much like the Carruth house, the Moreland house always has greenery in view, with the oak tree in front, the pecan tree outside the master bedroom window, bamboo, azaleas and more.

“We never were gardeners before because we weren’t looking at the garden,” Rick says. “Now we’re always looking at the garden.”

Facing the street on the ground level are the kitchen, front door and patio. The kitchen’s doors open onto the porch and the front door opens into the dining/living area. Stairs in the nearly 20-foot, open-ceiling living room lead to the second floor; beyond it lays a bedroom, bathroom and access to the detached garage. Upstairs at the back of the house is the master bedroom and bathroom. Above the kitchen and the dining room is Rick’s study that opens onto a balcony. [He’s an English professor at LSU. She’s a service assistant with Cancer Services of Greater Baton Rouge.]

Throughout the design process, naturally, there were things that came and went and never were. Susan, for example, wanted a front porch. Instead she got the balcony and patio, where they spend quite a bit of time. At one point the house was to be L-shaped, which became just the patio making an L-shape. A “box” part of the study that forms a study wall was supposed to look as if it were “floating” from the ceiling. It’s not, and has an overhead beam instead. And the corner of the master bedroom shower stall that protrudes into the living room was suggested to be frosted glass to help illuminate the space.

“A lot of things got cut out because of expenses,” Rick says. “But it didn’t seem like we had any kind of dead ends where we started over. It evolved.”

TOWERING OCCUPANCY

Owner: Trina and Dwayne Carruth

Subdivision: Goodwood Place

Architect: Front Door Design Studio

Builder: Logan Killen

Move-in: 2003

Square footage: 3,515

Materials: Corrugated metal, siding plaster, concrete

The window-washer at the home of local architects Trina and Dwayne Carruth steadies his ladder, eying the distance he’s about to scale.

“You trust it?” Trina asks.

“Not really.”

Jokes aside, the window-washer will have to get about 19 feet up to clean the window tops of the Carruth’s exterior tower, a recently completed 787-square-foot addition to the home. Windows [seldom dressed with treatments] and high ceilings helped create a loft-type space the Carruths wanted while infusing a sense of openness and connection to the outdoors.

Trina says she likes the openness of the house and that it’s more of a “wandering-type space,” where she can move from room to room without feeling like she’s running all over the house. It’s fluidly disconnected.

After entering through the Carruths’ front door, which is actually a steel gate, the wandering starts. To the left is an office; to the right the house begins with the courtyard, master bedroom/bathroom, pool area and predominantly concrete-floored, white-walled main wing [living room, kitchen, half-bath, utility room, kids’ rooms, kids’ bathroom and recently added multi-use room with a full bathroom].

In wandering, it’s possible to be outdoors as comfortably and easily as indoors. Two glass sliding garage doors, about 10 feet-by-8 feet, in the kitchen and living room provide versatile views and access. The near-constant visible greenery is one of the aspects Dwayne likes the best: bamboo, ligustrums, oaks.

“Upstairs it’s like you’re in a treehouse,” he says. “It’s just green all the way around.”

Some of the best green views are from Dwayne’s towers, one visible from the exterior and the other dividing and joining the kitchen and living room. [“He has a thing with towers,” Trina says.] The exterior-visible one, the window-washer’s challenge, contains the kids’ rooms and bathroom on the ground floor and the multi-use space and bathroom on the second floor.

Dwayne and Trina designed the multi-use space to serve as a guest room/media room/exercise room/homework room/etc. That second-story space, mainly covered in MDF paneled flooring, has built-in wall storage with sliding doors and two expansive windows with built-in beds and walnut desks.

Iron stairs against a white wall in the living room lead to Dwayne’s other tower, a roughly 8-foot perch that gives him almost 360 degrees’ worth of views indoors and outdoors. It’s his desk on top, while the base contains the refrigerator, pantry and a wet bar.

The master bedroom/bathroom suite might be tower-free and separate from the main wing, but it has a fair share of views. One side of the bed has courtyard views, while the other looks into the bathroom and beyond. The bathroom has a slim vanity that extends from the wall, creating his and hers spaces with built-in cabinets and closets. Opposite the vanity are the toilet, tub and open shower. The only thing lacking in the bathroom, Trina says, is the floor on which to put clothes. [That’s a polite battle the husband and wife architects deal with in their designs as well as their home.]

Though the couple had designed houses for themselves before, this was the first they’ve built. They don’t plan on moving anytime soon.

“We were shooting for something that was livable, contemporary and fit into the neighborhood,” Dwayne says. “Somewhat fit into the neighborhood.”

SEPARATING CONVENTION

Owner: Robert Zwirn

Subdivision: Zee Zee Gardens

Architect: Robert Zwirn

Builder: Joseph Patin

Move-in: 2001

Square footage: 2,100

Materials: HardiePanel, metal

Architect and LSU professor Robert Zwirn says he’s done designing houses for himself. He’s designed six or seven, with this Zee Zee Gardens his third built in Baton Rouge. Now a New Orleans resident, he says he’s past the stage when he needs to prove to himself that he can still design.

If this is indeed the one he goes out with in Baton Rouge, he’s going out on a high note. Literally, there’s an observation area on the roof that’s so high up you can see City Park and University lakes. Accessible by a ship’s ladder next to the front door, the area is sheltered by a polycarbonate rain shield and can be illuminated as a light tower.

Puns aside, Zwirn designed the house to take best advantage of ventilation and sunlight. The west-facing front of the house has few windows, while the south-facing, second-story porch is tilted about seven to 10 degrees of the lot line to capture the sun when it’s lower in the sky, keeping the porch “nice and pleasant.” To further aid temperature regulation, the metal roof reflects light and the heating and air conditioning are geothermal. No outside compressor is needed, since five wells were dug into the ground and the groundwater temperature serves as the heat source.

Zwirn says when he, his daughter and his ex-wife lived in the home, their lives centered on the living room and the porch. The living room has built-in bookshelves, stereo equipment and a television.

“When the weather was like it is now, we just opened the French doors and it was essentially one big indoor-outdoor room,” he says.

The most direct route to the living room is through the front door, which opens onto a raised open-air hallway. The hallway leads into the living room, which is book ended by bedrooms and bathrooms on each side that have north- and south-facing windows for cross-ventilation. At the end of the hallway are stairs that lead down into the dining room and kitchen. Another hallway joins the kitchen, creating a back wall for the garage that extends into a third bedroom/office. There are doors on either side of the hallway’s midpoint that allow for garage or garden-entry access into the home.

Though Zwirn says the home employs techniques of south Louisiana’s indigenous buildings, it’s not afraid of doing so while being different.