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Great Materials: Common Brick Stacks Up Style
So basic and yet so incredibly versatile, bricks can dress home exteriors, walls, roofs and more. Here's how to bring out their best
Houzz Contributor. My name is Bud Dietrich and I am an architect located in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. I am licensed to practice architecture in Illinois, Florida, New Jersey & Wisconsin and I am a certificate holder from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB). Since 1996 I have worked from my home office and provide full architectural services exclusively to the single family residential market. My passion is to transform my clients' houses into their homes. I strive to have the "new" home accommodate my clients' lives without fighting them at every junction. I look to add curb appeal to encourage a beautiful streetscape. And I design any addition to look and feel like it has always been there.
Our projects have won numerous design awards as well as having...
Houzz Contributor. My name is Bud Dietrich and I am an architect located... More »
When it comes to building materials, it doesn't get any more basic than brick. Small (mostly), modular and generally cost effective, brick has been around for thousands of years and has been a building material of choice from ancient Sumeria to modern America.
Available in a range of sizes, shapes, colors and textures, brick can provide high style or a common touch. It can dress walls, floors and ceilings. It can be left just as it came out of the kiln or finished onsite with paint or another treatment. It can be laid with wide or thin jointing, arranged in a variety of patterns and used to create three-dimensional effects.
And though brick is wonderfully adaptable and versatile, the feature I most like about it is that a brick can be held in your hand. A brick is just an elemental, modular building component that gets stacked one on top of the other to form a wall, a room, a home, a city. And when I see a brick wall, I really get a sense of the craftsman's hand.
The next time you look at a brick wall, think about how each brick was placed, one at a time, with skill and care.
Available in a range of sizes, shapes, colors and textures, brick can provide high style or a common touch. It can dress walls, floors and ceilings. It can be left just as it came out of the kiln or finished onsite with paint or another treatment. It can be laid with wide or thin jointing, arranged in a variety of patterns and used to create three-dimensional effects.
And though brick is wonderfully adaptable and versatile, the feature I most like about it is that a brick can be held in your hand. A brick is just an elemental, modular building component that gets stacked one on top of the other to form a wall, a room, a home, a city. And when I see a brick wall, I really get a sense of the craftsman's hand.
The next time you look at a brick wall, think about how each brick was placed, one at a time, with skill and care.
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Celebrate the brick's irregularity. Even simple, common brick takes on an elegance and richness when left exposed. Cleaned up and restored, this brick is laid in a running bond pattern with a soldier course of stacked bricks on top. Color, texture, patina and craft combine to create a perfect complement for a modern stairway.
by Jane Kim Design
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Use brick to complement modernity. This hand-laid brick wall shows evidence of a mason at work, stacking one brick atop another. The irregular and worn character of the brick acts as a foil to the less unique, factory-made glass and steel objects. The design is all the more interesting for this yin and yang approach.
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Use brick authentically. Celebrate the permanence and weight of brick by using it all around. Although it costs more, turning the corner with brick lends a sense of caring and quality that brick veneered only to the front can't achieve. Consider arches, corner quoins and other details that celebrate the long and rich history of brick construction.
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| Use brick decoratively. Brick comes in any color and size imaginable. So vary the color, size, placement and location when laying a brick wall. Also consider changes to the mortar joints. By changing colors at different courses and by deeply raking the horizontal joints while filling the vertical joints flush, Frank Lloyd Wright achieved amazing visual effects. |
Add a little detail. It doesn't take much to go from boring, bland and severe to interesting and relaxed. It could be as simple as the addition of a horizontal shadow line every few courses.
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You also could add detail with a pattern of diamonds across one part of the facade, using brick to create shadow and texture in an easy and inexpensive way.
Follow brick's lead. When they span an opening, bricks naturally create a curve that at once expresses how the wall is resisting gravity and, by changing orientation, tells us that we're approaching something special, like an entrance.
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by Hufft Projects
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| Let the bricks curve. Brick walls don't have to have 90-degree corners. By its very nature, brick is an ideal material for curving walls. Just look at Thomas Jefferson's serpentine wall at the University of Virginia to see how plastic a brick wall can be. |
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Let brick be modern. We may have been building with brick for thousands of years, but it is still one of the most modern materials. For an updated aesthetic, bricks may be stacked to form a screen wall separated by an opening, rather than arranged to span an opening.
by Jamison Howard
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Use brick to warm and cool a home. With its mass, brick is a natural heat sink. During the day, brick will absorb the sun's radiation and retain it as heat. During the night, when temperatures are cooler, brick will give off this heat, keeping the interior cooler in summer and warmer in winter. This natural ability, combined with deep verandas, kept many old Southern homes quite comfortable throughout the year.
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| Make a brick base. Because of its inherent mass and sense of permanence as well as its ability to withstand much that wood cannot, brick makes an ideal base. Use brick to raise the house up when separation from the land below is needed. |
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Dress up brick with stone accents. Complementing brick with cut-stone details, such as string courses, lintels and window surrounds, achieves another level of refinement. More playful and ornamental, the cut-stone details provide relief from an all-brick facade.
Remodeling Guides: Great building materials
Remodeling Guides: Great building materials
Ideabook published on May 17, 2012.
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1) Replace all of the brick (which is typically cost prohibitive).
2) Salvage as best you can the existing brick, use that on the most visible parts of the addition and use a new, closely matching brick elsewhere.
3) Match the brick texture for texture and then paint or recolor it. Recoloring can be done by firms such as Nawkaw (www.nawkaw.com)
4) Use a different material at the addition, especially if it's a smaller addition. This can be a nice way to add some interest into the overall design.
Hope this helps