Alberta Arts Cottage

where: NE Portland
when: 2007-2019
what: single family residence and music/wood shop

Architects Home
The average sized house in the 1950s is the same size as the average sized garage today.  When I came across this statistic I was intrigued as to the why.  Was it need? want? I found in my research that as societies grow more affluent their housing grows in scale commensurate to wealth.  It clearly became not an equation of need rather an equation of want and/or can.  It is easy to design a space to meet the needs of a client by adding square footage...take those same needs and add the constraint of limited space and the design problem becomes exponentially harder.  That is exactly what I did.  I purposefully found a small nondescript house for this challenge.  Treated more like a boat then a house, every square inch of the space is thoughtfully designed to meet the needs of living in a small space.

The project consists of a 940sf house with a detached 240sf wood shop w/ 240sf piano studio above.