The Home of the Month series is a collaborative effort with the N.C. State University College of Design through its Home Environments Design Initiative. Featured homes, selected by an expert panel, highlight the benefits of good home design and represent the diversity of homes and home renovations designed by North Carolina architects. The stories, written by faculty, graduate students and alumni of the School of Architecture, bring to light the exemplary attributes of each home. Our goal is to offer inspiration and knowledge that can be applied to your living space.

Millie, the longtime canine companion to Don and Susan Tise, has it made. She lounges on the second-floor balcony, her nose pressed between the railings, reveling in the perfume of spring blossoms and relaxed by the burbling of the rocky stream below.

Though it is only a few miles from the hubbub of Chapel Hill's Franklin Street, the Tises' quiet, wooded hillside has a lot to offer in the way of relaxation and solitude.

"It often feels like we are in the mountains," Don Tise says.

Tise, a principal architect in the firm Tise-Kiester Architects, wanted to let the qualities of the site inform the design of his home. The result is a home perfectly suited for the day-to-day lives of its residents.

The design offers not only personal touches, but also creative responses to common topics in residential design: sensitivity to the site, openness, efficiency.

The open floor plan is born of the desire to have easy communication between people in different parts of the home. Openness is easy enough to achieve, but how does one achieve openness while maintaining the character of each room?

"We wanted the house to function well for everyday life," Tise said. "We need to be able to communicate well between spaces, but we also want to be able to contain activities and not disturb each other."

Eyes on the site

Tise designed the main spaces to be open to one another by minimizing walls. He then used one of the site's most compelling features, its steep slope, to divide the home into distinct zones.

Instead of moving enough earth to create a level building pad or excavating a large hole for a walk-out basement, Tise designed the home to step up the terrain.

The slight elevation changes inside the house define three main sections: the living room, the kitchen/dining areas and the guest rooms.

Tise designed the house to step horizontally, too. A boldly painted corridor curves along one side of the house, connecting the sections and serving as a unifying element.

In addition to the changes in floor level, the rooms are defined by variations in the ceiling planes.

In the living room and kitchen, individual beams were wrapped in drywall to serve as implied boundaries between the spaces. The sloped ceiling and curved walls in the corridor help define the hall as a unique element even though it also serves as the main entry and seating space for the breakfast nook.

Tise used wall thickness and the spaces between the structural columns to create display niches, window seats and recessed cabinetry, each of which lends a sense of scale and character to the spaces.

As one of the Home of the Month selection panelists commented, "The use of cabinetry enhances how the living spaces work."

No space for waste

One of the couple's main objectives was efficient use of space and materials.

"There is not a bit of wasted space in the house," Tise said.

In order to create a sense of spaciousness without increasing the square footage, the architect again looked to the site's natural features.

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