Washington DC.   1800ft2 

Best Foot Backward -

As a building typology, the townhouse suffers from front-back schizophrenia. Some have a street-centric presence, front porches and stoops that encourage hanging about. Others are socially awkward up front but have interesting interior lives, and, ideally, private space in the back that makes up for the inability to relate up front. 

These differences reflect the social prerogatives of the time they were built. Our townhouse project in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington DC is a perfect example of the introverted townhouse. It was built in 1978, in the midst of the Carter Administration, when Washington DC was the murder capital of the nation and the city was in the final throes of post-war white-flight. 

Our townhouse was built in a moment of optimism, part of a program to provide new housing stock in neighborhoods where the people who could afford new homes were looking for them in leafy suburbs. It was a townhouse built to compete with the cul-de-sac rambler. Despite its central urban location, its first priority was the car. It’s second priority was security, and its third priority was, well, a sunken living room. 

With its one car garage dominating the front facade, and predicable, derivatively historicist fenestration, the townhouse has an uninviting street presence. On the first floor, a dark, narrow kitchen divided the sunken living room from a quasi-formal dining area; on the second floor tiny bathrooms were hemmed in by unnecessarily large circulation space. Everywhere, residual Victorian notions of the division of space based on divisions of gender and labor were fighting hard with 1970s Free To Be You and Me. 

Yanking this property into a more contemporary mode took several steps. Our first was to blow the kitchen open. Walls on the ground floor needed to do more than just divide things. We used millwork storage blocks to delineate spaces and create continuity from front to back. 

Litchfield, ME.     800ft2

In the 1920s, the small towns in an inland lake district in central Maine began dividing parcels of land into small "camps" to attract distant urbanites to invest in inexpensive vacation homes. Aggregations of camps were known as "colonies". At Pleasant Pond land use restrictions were minimal; many camps were built on or over the water, raised up on stilts. Many were built close together, with no setback requirements. 

The property on Pleasant Pond Lane includes a camp dating from the original colony. The property has been in the same family for 75 years, its narrow boomerang shape is almost unbuildable by today's zoning restrictions. The family  desires a small, winterized, self-sufficient house, in contrast to the uninsulated summer-use-only camp on the property's waterfront.  

The proposed house is situated at the highpoint of the site to maximize views and allow the roof solar array to sit above the surrounding forest. The 800 square foot house coincidentally mirrors the site's boomerang shape, to maximize the efficiency of the solar panels year-round and create a gently enclosed private zone on the south exposure. The northern facades will be partially under grade where the hill peaks out, this minimizes the vis-a-vis with a  neighboring house and improves envelope efficiency to make up for the home's less-than thermally ideal long, narrow shape. On the interior, the opposing ends will contain adult and children's bedrooms, with living space in the middle, centered on a wood burning stove.



The first phase of the project includes a redesign of the kitchen in the existing camp. The tiny kitchen has two walls that separate it from the larger living areas. These function as sheer walls. The design maintains the structural function of these walls much as a honeycomb has structure,  by converting them to built-in storage "boxes", while opening them up to the space beyond. 

Washington DC.      1,700ft2

A redesign of a classic two-story Capital Hill townhouse to optimize function through all stages of a family's evolution. This requires turning the house upside down.

Currently, the townhouse is divided into two separate units on two floors, each with its own HVAC, water and electric meters, and entrances. The client wanted to return the townhouse to a traditional single-family configuration, with a parlor floor downstairs and bedrooms up. We proposed something different. 

Rather than give up the second unit and lose the potential for rental income, we dedicated the back 1/3rd of the first floor to an autonomous efficiency apartment that can also be used as a large bedroom, or a mother-in-law suite, or a temperamental teen-ager hideout, or a  crash pad for a jobless post-college returnee. An accommodation for all potential changes in the life of a family, and perhaps AirBnB.



To do this, the living space is brought to the second floor where there is the potential for loft-style living: open plan, more light, higher ceilings, and more privacy. Downstairs the efficiency gets its own entrance off the alley, and the door between the efficiency and the main space can be readily accessible or sealed, depending on the family's needs at any given time.