Dennis & Carolyn Devine, the owners of the Witness Tree Vineyard in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, decided to fully renovate the 1920s farmhouse on their winery property and asked Arrow-wood Homes to design it as a hybrid timber frame home. Arrow-wood project architect Ross Farland and timber frame designer Chris Frey were assigned to the project.

The existing house was completely re-imagined to serve as a bedroom wing, with the original living room becoming the new master suite. The original fireplace forms the focus of this room, and the entrance from the porch doubles as a retreat or office space.

To provide extra living space for Stephen Westby, Witness Tree’s winemaker, and his family, we proposed a timber frame addition with a new entry area, an open great room, kitchen and dining room that can also serve as a VIP tasting room. A wide deck at the back will provide plenty of room for outdoor entertaining.

Later in the process, after the timber frame was raised and the SIPS shell was on, the owners decided to replace the original porch with a timber frame porch and to add some variety to the exterior finishing materials, as the sketch drawing below shows. The foundation of the house will now have a stone facing to provide a strong visual base. Horizontal lap siding is still the dominant finish, but to tie the old and the new, a certain amount of irregular shingle siding has been introduced at the tops of the gables. Finally, the window arrangement on the front gable has been simplified by omitting two upper arched windows, but the center two windows are tied together vertically with trim.