Salt Lake City, Utah
Nate Jaramillo of Loft Six Four explains how to convince customers of the benefits of roof terraces, and shares some clever design ideas for these special spaces.
Easier marketing thanks to improved habitability
Virtually every city in the United States is experiencing a shortage of publicly accessible outdoor spaces. This scarcity leads urban apartment designers to create private outdoor spaces that enhance the livability and appeal of their properties.
The high cost of land often dictates that building footprints extend right up to property lines, leaving little or no space for street-level outdoor development. However, if you look up, you'll see that thousands of empty roof terraces constitute usable surfaces. At Loft Six Four, we make the most of every usable square metre of roof terrace by creating outdoor living spaces that offer an immersive experience.
Complexity and high stakes
Although there is a demand for such developments, it's not easy to recreate a quality outdoor environment atop urban buildings. Roof terraces are costly, complex and subject to engineering and building code constraints, not to mention the major issues involved: the designer's reputation, project profitability and relations with investors, the municipality and members of the community.
Successful roof terraces offer designers a great opportunity to stand out from the competition and achieve resounding success.
Visualization, documentation and integration: our three pillars
When Loft Six Four developed its expertise in roof terraces, SketchUp immediately proved to be an ideal tool for our design process. It helps convince our customers of the benefits of building a roof terrace, and helps them visualize their project. Among the many advantages of SketchUp, here are the three main ones.
Studies of shadow cast as a function of sun angle on a design project for a flat roof.
1. Quick and easy visualization
SketchUp is the fastest 3D modeling software on the market. While its visualization functions provide a very fine level of detail, its value lies above all in the simplicity of modeling. We use SketchUp to quickly study relationships and scale in 3D, just as naturally as when we draw an idea on tracing paper.
SketchUp's basic tools are easy to master, as are the general principles of organizing files with tags, groups and components; and finding design iterations within the same file is child's play. 3D Warehouse is an enormous time-saver, enabling us to reuse our customized components in new designs rather than starting from scratch.
Our team can accurately predict variations in shadow throughout the year thanks to geolocation and the Shade panel, a particularly important feature in urban environments where a large proportion of outdoor spaces are overshadowed by adjacent buildings. It's essential to determine the exact location of elements such as swimming pools, so that they benefit from optimum exposure. SketchUp offers an easy way of calculating this, as well as showing the results.
Detailed plans for a pergola.
2. Quality documentation with SketchUp and LayOut
We design many custom elements during the course of our flat roof projects, and we've found that a detailed 2D CAD drawing simply isn't enough. The Loft Six Four team uses LayOut for the vast majority of our construction documentation sets. We like the ability to link our SketchUp models directly to Layout, allowing us to show different views, add dimensioning and annotations, and label every detail to find it on our site plan.
By combining SketchUp and LayOut to expose detailed 3D plans and materials, we can communicate the design intent more clearly to the contractor, which is an incredible advantage, among many others. Most of the time, the proposed changes we incorporate into bids and shop drawings improve the design. The contractor understands our design intent and backs it up with construction expertise. The detailed 3D plans we create in SketchUp are a fantastic communication tool that saves everyone time and money during construction.
Rendering of a roof terrace.
3. Integration with other software
Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to share files with other construction consultants due to format incompatibility. On every project, we coordinate with architects, interior designers, MEP engineers, structural engineers and civil engineers. It is therefore essential that they can reference our design in their sketches, and vice versa.
The great thing about SketchUp is that it's compatible with a large number of software packages and includes a whole range of import and export options, giving us greater flexibility to collaborate with other disciplines.
Freedom to focus on the essentials
SketchUp makes it easy to model in 3D and create presentation layouts. We don't have to worry about production, so we can concentrate on the essentials: how to design attractive spaces that will create excitement. SketchUp enables our customers to visualize and validate designs they can be proud of.
Ready to get started with SketchUp? Try it free for 30 days.
If you're already a subscriber and would like to take your project to the next level, with sunlight and shadow studies, as well as a true-to-life context, the next step is PreDesign, which is included with Pro and Studio subscriptions.
Discover other examples of how Loft Six Four creates spectacular experiences and amazing projects.
