Elevated Sunset Charm | Kansas City Homes & Style

Kansas City Homes & Style covered the backyard Faust Construction built behind a 1926 house in Sunset Hill, on a site that falls thirty feet from the front of the house to the back and another ten to twelve feet past the pool. As Brian Faust told the magazine, “from front to back, there is a 30-foot drop in elevation. Essentially, the house is on a cliff.”

That is the engineering problem the whole project turns on. A gunite pool on a slope like that needs a foundation sized for the hillside before anything above it can sit still, and the terraces, drainage and irrigation all have to be resolved in sequence rather than corrected later.

The pergola is the other half. Mark McHenry of McHenry Shaffer Architecture drew curved Accoya trusses spanning more than twenty feet with no mid-span columns, engineered with Mike Skeens. Faust called the two of them an integral part of the design.

See the Mellor project page, My Design KC’s later look at the same house, or read about building in Kansas City, Missouri.