McKenzie River Custom Residence: Custom Home Structural Engineering in Oregon

Location: On the McKenzie River, just north of Eugene, Oregon
Client/Owner: Our client, the owner
Partners: Six Degrees Construction; Andy Meakins (designer)
Year: Designed 2013; built 2014
Size/scale: About 2,860 sq ft of living space on two levels, plus a separate garage wing
JBE services: Structural design, design revisions during construction, structural observation and final observation
Sector: Residential

McKenzie River custom residence structural engineering project, Oregon — photo 4

The challenge

The owners wanted a modern home with cantilevered corners, crisp, angular shed roofs and a lot of glass. Each of those makes a house harder to hold up. A cantilevered beam needs a back-span and a solid connection to carry its load, and big glass walls along the view side leave little room for the conventional shear walls that resist wind and earthquake loads.

Project photos

What we did

Working with Six Degrees Construction, we did the structural design of the residence: an L-shaped, wood-framed house with a two-storey wing, set on a structural slab. It was a complex and interesting process that called for a custom structural solution to deliver what the owners wanted. The cantilevered corners started as glulam beams. During construction we revised them to steel — a W18 beam at one corner, and a W8 beam carrying the patio awning at the other — with welded steel columns and the roof trusses tied to the steel through welded studs. Plywood shear walls with hold-downs and strapping, placed between the large glazed walls, take the lateral loads.

We stayed with the project through construction, with structural observations of the footings, stem walls and framing, and a final observation letter in January 2015.

The result

A beautiful, modern residence on the McKenzie River that does what the owners asked for, with its cantilevers, sharp lines and glass intact. It’s typical of the work a custom home structural engineer on the McKenzie River, Oregon is brought in for — projects where the design leads and the structure has to make it work.