Many, if not all, architects dream of building a house for themselves. But before the costly and laborious work can get underway, there are clients to attend to, families to feed and money to save.
In Ian Miley’s case, the dream came true unexpectedly. Last year, Mr. Miley, 33, moved into a 575-square-foot house in Berkeley, Calif., that was planned and built by Type Five, a local firm where he is the design director. The home occupies a verdant lot off Martin Luther King Way, near the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches in the College of Environmental Design.
The catch, if you can call it that: This is a model house. Type Five produces housing of all sizes, but it devotes much of its practice to accessory dwelling units (A.D.U.s), the small stand-alone buildings and annexes that have been popping up in residential California neighborhoods to help combat the state’s housing shortage. Among the people who regularly drop by Mr. Miley’s A.D.U. are potential clients.
“I wanted to keep it relatively minimal, so these big windows and tall ceilings and open spaces could be the main character,” he said of the unit’s laid-back, modern interior.
The little house, which sits behind a traditional bungalow in the North Berkeley neighborhood, was not originally meant for him. A Bay Area restaurant owner, who had inherited the bungalow from family members and turned it into a rental, approached Type Five to build a backyard A.D.U. that also could be rented out.
While deciding what the A.D.U. should look like, the restaurateur, who declined to be named in this article because of a wish to remain private, had imagined a variety of possible tenants: maybe a graduate student, a young professional or a couple in their starter home.
If you were to live in the house, how would you design it? the client asked Mr. Miley.
At the time, the question was theoretical. Mr. Miley had attended college at Berkeley but was then living in Boston and teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. From a distance, he ran through a gamut of user possibilities with his partners before they settled on a comfortably sized one-bedroom cottage. Set on a 40-foot-wide lot, its footprint would be compact enough to leave room for a detached art studio building that could also serve as a home office or guest quarters.
The A.D.U. was to be sited perpendicularly to the bungalow, creating more privacy and opening a front wall of south-facing windows to maximize the daylight. A fence between the two buildings would ensure that each had its own yard. The A.D.U.’s exterior was to be light green corrugated metal that harmonized with the surrounding lushness.
A year ago, soon after the walls were up and the windows hung, Mr. Miley relocated to Berkeley to be closer to the center of his company’s action. The restaurateur had not yet found a tenant, so he agreed to rent it to him for $3,000 per month.
Mr. Miley was able to consider multiple options for the little property, because customization is fundamental to Type Five’s approach. The company, he said, combines the efficiencies of houses that are factory-made and trucked to a location with the versatility of homes that are built on site.
Rather than offer cookie-cutter prefabs, the firm uses computer software that it developed to model and produce bespoke designs. Cost savings come from the use of standardized elements that the units incorporate when they are assembled on a site, including built-in furnishings like Murphy beds and modules containing entire bathrooms and kitchens. The software’s ability to quickly generate refined construction documents that are ready for permitting, even if plans have been tweaked, also brings down expenses.
Mr. Miley’s A.D.U. was built in five months for about $300,000, he said. On average, Type Five projects cost about $550 per square foot, including site work. That figure is competitive in the Bay Area, where new builds easily price out at $800 per square foot without site preparation.
Jin Ouk Choi, an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering and construction at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that while Type Five’s approach lacks the speed and cost advantages of factory-built housing, “they are tackling the niche market of A.D.U.s with a sound strategy: design standardization.”
Allowing clients to pick and choose among available standardized design options is “more cost-effective than the traditional stick-built or highly customized modular methods,” Mr. Choi said.
Once Mr. Miley took over the lease, his stake in the little property became truly personal: He could arrange a kitchen that took up the house’s full width so that it accommodated dinner parties. (The cabinetry is doctored IKEA; the appliances are from Bosch and Fisher & Paykel). He could flaunt his taste for colorful geometric furnishings. (These included a Schoolhouse dining table, Eames dining chairs, Nordic Knots rugs, Gantri lights and an Akron Street bed frame. There are also several custom pieces.) He could introduce a landscape with decks, gravel beds and curving paths. He could plant a garden with strawberries, marigolds, tomatoes and basil.
But he’s always mindful that his home is a kind of showroom. “I want to make sure that people are not distracted when they visit and can really see the architecture,” he said. “But I don’t feel like I’m tamping down my style in any way to accommodate that.”
So if he were to design his own home without considering anyone other than himself, would it look like this?
“I think it’s actually quite close,” he said.
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