Tucked In: Blue Star Corner, a Bay Area infill project, fits 20 townhome units, 26 parking spaces, six bicycle spaces, and three tranquil courtyards onto .7 acre.
Credit: Photo: courtesy David Baker + Partners
Settlers in America connected the dots from the Atlantic to the Pacific long ago, but today’s builders are grappling with frontiers of a different nature. In the landscape of the current recession, the issues of the day all seem to involve questions about density, whether the challenge is to eke a small profit out of a leftover scrap of land, to make homes more affordable for credit-crunched buyers, or to ease the energy crisis by aggregating more people around shared infrastructure, jobs, and transit. As our world becomes more populous, higher-density housing is, frankly, inevitable. Builder looks at four small, attached projects that have addressed density head-on and done it delightfully well.
Plug and Play
Flexible Condos fill the holes in a master plan.
It’s not uncommon for a master plan developer to end up with scattered bits and pieces of unused land once a major phase of the community nears completion. It’s happened a few times in Stapleton, the famed airport redevelopment outside Denver that’s become a model for New Urbanism.
“Forest City [Enterprises] often comes to us when they need to solve a problem,” says Caroline Hoyt, co-founder and concept adviser at McStain Neighborhoods. “The problem this time was that there were little leftover pieces of land sprinkled throughout the community, such as odd-shaped tracts that don’t subdivide themselves into a typical New Urbanist alley/street configuration,” she explains.
One of McStain’s earlier responses to such a challenge materialized as a series of small carriage homes stacked above garages, which could be plugged into all sorts of odd nooks and crannies. When these coupe-sized homes sold out quickly, the builder realized they were filling a void not just in the site plan, but also in the marketplace, catering to smaller households and single buyers. The latest variation on that theme, The Casitas, places 22 units—similarly designed with living spaces atop garages at grade—on roughly an acre (110 feet by 450 feet), with homes separated by walking paseos. Each mix-and-match plan can stand alone as a detached house or can become part of an attached cluster in which units are conjoined at the garages.
“The building forms are like LEGOs. You can attach them in many different ways so you almost never have to repeat a building,” Hoyt says. “As long as you have a site that’s relatively flat, you can make these fit on the strangest piece of ground imaginable.”
The first enclave of Casitas opened in late September and snagged five reservations within a week. “Sometimes the most challenging restraint can produce the most gratifying result,” Hoyt says. “Here’s something you can do with an oddball, unwanted piece of land and get something great out of it—in this case, at 20 units to the acre.”
Location: Stapleton, Colo.
Builder: McStain Neighborhoods, Denver
Developer: Forest City Enterprises, Cleveland
Architect: Wolff Lyon Architects, Boulder, Colo.
Web site: www.stapletoncasitas.com
Every Which Way
Urban Lofts adapt to rugged conditions.
Nesting urban-style condos into this 51-acre stretch of Texas Hill Country wasn’t easy. The topography of the high bluff (which is surrounded by more than 24,000 acres of nature preserve) consisted of a thin layer of topsoil over a massive slab of steeply sloping limestone. Add to that the hundreds of indigenous oaks, cedars, and boulders that the city of Austin wanted to preserve. An analysis conducted by local civil engineers concluded that the site couldn’t support more than 65 or 70 units, given that only 9.2 acres were actually buildable. The young developers at CSGM and the architects at JZMK Partners took that pronouncement as a challenge and raised the ante to 101 units.
Natural and municipal constraints played a major role in shaping the anatomy and orientation of the homes that now compose The Hillside. Chief among those constraints was an exceedingly compressed building envelope, thanks to a 28-foot height limit and a 4-foot allowable cut-and-fill restriction.
“From the existing topography, you could not go down more than 4 feet from any place,” explains architect Don Jacobs, meaning the standard retaining wall solution to hillside development was out of the question. “Given the height limit, the buildings really had to be sandwiched in there. And the city wanted to avoid a Southern California kind of situation where you chop off the tops of mountains and regrade everything.”
Deferring gently to nature, The Hillside offers up six floor plans in 28 different building configurations (these include a sprinkling of freestanding detached units, but mostly plex buildings housing two to seven units). Out of respect for the terrain and the height cap, the plans—which range from 1,315 to 2,395 square feet—can be stacked right-side-up or upside-down with the second floor sitting either above or below the garage at grade.
“Each building had to be evaluated and custom designed to fit the piece of land it sits on,” says senior designer Katja Axmann. “In the steeper portions of the site, we came up with a downhill unit where you park on the ground level, but then the main living spaces are downstairs rather than upstairs.”
Water management was another issue. Restrictions relating to ground cover were resolved with a combination of open decks, wood slat walkways, and pervious concrete to ensure proper site drainage.
With their industrial cladding and loft-style spaces, the homes are every bit as cool as similar downtown buildings catering to young hipsters. But they also offer something the city digs don’t: They feel like tree houses, offering bird’s-eye views of downtown Austin and the surrounding hills.
Location: Austin, Texas
Builder: Senderro Construction Services, Austin
Developer: CSGM Canyon Ridge, Austin
Architect: JZMK Partners, Irvine, Calif.
Web site: www.hillside2222.com
Dutch Treat
Skinny row homes take a vertical leap of faith.
When your charge is to introduce 20 new housing units to a site that’s less than an acre (.7 to be exact), of which nearly a third is to be preserved as open space, you’ve got nowhere to go but up. And in this LEED-certified infill project, every inch of vertical space is put to good use.
Inspired, in part, by the space-saving row homes that now inhabit Amsterdam’s old shipyards, Blue Star Corner orients four rows of tall, skinny townhomes around English-style mews. Kinetic steel birdhouse sculptures, cable trellises, and drought-tolerant plantings create intimate public gathering places in the narrow, 24-foot-wide courtyards between the buildings.
Inside the units, which range from 1,300 to 1,700 square feet, living spaces are creatively stacked in three or four levels—rising up from a modest footprint of just 15 feet by 30 feet. Two of the three plans offer a mezzanine level between the second and third floors, complete with a raised, upholstered “chill pod” that can be used as a reading nook, entertainment cocoon, sleeping platform, or extra storage space.
“The idea for the chill pods was driven by what the code allows,” explains architect Kevin Wilcock. In order to qualify as a mezzanine, a space must be open to the adjoining floor below and cannot have a floor area larger than a third of the square footage of the floor below. The pod creatively adds more functional space to the mezzanine without blowing the ratio. “Technically, the chill pod doesn’t count as floor space because you can’t stand up in it. We sold it as a raised area that creates a ceiling for the kitchen underneath,” he says.
About that kitchen: It’s equally economical, incorporating electronic charging stations inside cabinets, a built-in oven tucked underneath the stair landing, and a separate undercounter refrigerator and freezer in lieu of a big box fridge–freezer combo. “Without that large, bulky appliance, you have a nice, open stretch of counter space and the kitchen feels larger than it actually is,” Wilcock says.
And then there’s the car factor: The project’s parking solution, which integrates 26 car spaces into tuck-under garages attached to the units at grade—plus six bicycle spots—was a major cost saver. “A structured underground podium garage might run you $50,000 to $60,000 per unit, and we were able to avoid that,” says Wilcock. The individual garages are small but functional, featuring built-in dog-washing areas and flip-down workstations with outlets and Peg-Boards.
Location: Emeryville, Calif.
Builder: Bjork Construction, Fremont, Calif.
Developer: Holliday Development, Emeryville
Architect: David Baker + Partners, San Francisco
Web site: www.bluestarcorner.com
Sweet and Low
Boomers go for small-town charm.
Downsizing is a great idea in theory, but when the move means cramming into a smaller unit in an attached building with no yard, perhaps surrounded by concrete, the transition can come as a lifestyle shock.
That hasn’t been the experience of empty-nesters moving to Winslowe’s View, a verdant village of small, cottage-style townhomes in the acclaimed planned community of The Pinehills. First off, some 70 percent of the neighborhood’s 214 acres are preserved as open space. Second, each low-lying building contains no more than two or three residences. As a result, the majority of homes are end units, and all enjoy multiple connections (including private ones) to nature.
“We want our homes to look like single-family homes, but, more importantly, we want them to live that way,” says Dan Green, president and principal of The Green Co., the builder of Winslowe’s View as well as the master developer of The Pinehills.
In some ways, the community offers something even better. “Since we control the whole site plan, the roads are not double-loaded,” Green adds. “So you aren’t looking out the window at your neighbor’s front yard or sitting on your patio with a view to the back of another house.”
The trick, he says, is thinking about land planning in reverse. “Most builders start with roads and then add homes. We start by walking the site multiple times in its natural condition, taking note of environmentally sensitive areas—be it a tall stand of trees, a vernal pool, an ocean view, or even a man-made golf course view—and then preserving that feature and siting homes around it. The last thing we do is figure out how to bring roads in.”
Although Winslowe’s View is not an age-restricted community, its homes cater to older buyers by design. The smallest houses in the neighborhood run a diminutive 1,100 to 1,550 square feet. None of the homes has more than two bedrooms on any floor, and most are master-down plans designed for single-story living.
“People who are thinking about downsizing out of a single-family house usually find they are living mostly on one floor and spending all their time in the kitchen, breakfast, and family room of their current house,” Green says. “Our homes are designed to work this way. And in almost all of the plans, the dining room and family room are open to each other, so at holiday time you can move the couches out of the way and accommodate 20 people for dinner.”
Traditional shingle cladding, gable-pitched roofs, and crisp trim give the cottages a quintessentially Cape Cod aesthetic that makes local buyers feel perfectly at home. The neighborhood even features an old-fashioned post office and a general store with penny candy in glass mason jars, a soda fountain, and a big cookie jar that operates on the honor system.
Location: Plymouth, Mass.
Builder/Developer: The Green Co., Plymouth
Architect: Dann Norris Batting Architect, Chester, N.H.
Web site: www.greencos.com/html/wvhome.htm