Affordable Home Prototypes

Set in challenging neighborhoods in need of respect and loving care, and built on extremely tight budgets, these catalytic new prototypes  for urban-infill and affordable homeownership provide amenities and spatial qualities not usually found in this type of housing. Although intended for affordable homeownership, the design of these homes aims to honor the rudiments of good living – particularly in Southern California:

• • Generously day-lit spaces
• • Seamless indoor-outdoor living beyond the traditional front/rear yard setup
• • High ceilings and openness that create a sense of luxury
• • Vivid colors animating the spaces
• • Direct connection to landscape and garden creating a variety of protected open spaces
  • Gracious processional spaces almost unprecedented on such narrow lots.

Though all prototypes are set in particularly tough neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, their design provides for integrated defensible space while maintaining openness and connection to outdoors. Street oriented open space, friendly pathways, fresh colors, and ample openings to the street take an aggressively optimistic attitude to each house’s neighborhood.

Using every tool in the architect’s palette—light and shadow, scale, proportion, shaped dramatic view-sheds, leaving no throwaway spaces, color, xeriscape planting and  permeable surfaces—generous home-and-gardens are created that fit into existing neighborhoods while energizing and honoring them.

These prototypes show that dignity, sense of luxury and healthy living are not reserved for those at the top of the social ladder.