PROJECTS / CITY LIVING
The Bluff
Creek House
Union Bay
The Nest
Hillside Modern
Roosevelt DADU
Garden | Gallery | House
The Quincho
Boomerang House
Courtyard House
Gallery House
Zipper House
Urban Residential Architecture: Designing Spaces for Modern City Living
In Seattle and around the Pacific Northwest, design for urban living can mean building a beautiful custom home with waterfront or mountain views and proximity to urban amenities, arts and culture. We are often asked to design for flexibility and intergenerational living, both common in urban homes that fulfill multiple roles over their lives. Attached and detached accessory dwelling units (ADUs and DADUs) increase opportunities for homeownership and provide flexibility. Custom residential design can provide the vibrancy and convenience of city living on constrained urban sites.
Beautiful Modern Homes in the City
Want your home to be a serene escape from the hustle and bustle of city life? Maybe you need a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ house that can grow with your family, offer hospitality to guests and support work from home. A custom urban home can balance privacy and convenience, great modern design and complex city regulations, ease and flexibility. Your timeless home should be designed to last – to allow you to age in place, to be resilient and sustainable, and to accommodate your needs now and in the future.
Any City, Anywhere
While many of our urban home projects are located near our Seattle and Lake Tahoe offices, we can help navigate the design process in many jurisdictions. Each city offers unique challenges and opportunities, and we’re excited to bring modern urban residential design to wherever you call home.
City Living Projects
Entry Courtyard with glimpses through the house
This Seattle Waterfront Residence serves as an urban retreat and a personal art gallery within reach of the arts and cultural amenities of the city. Visitors are greeted by modestly scaled single-story structures that fit in well with the neighbors. They are then welcomed into a private entry court with sculptures, a koi pond, and glimpses of Mt. Rainier and Lake Washington. For more, click here.
The Puget Sound Waterfront House is a refuge at the edge of the city. Lush landscaping creates a buffer from urban life and is a reminder of the native landscape that used to inhabit this urban site. Large windows and simple modern materials let the landscape take center stage while providing all the amenities needed for contemporary living, such as a generous chef’s kitchen, expansive wine cellar, family playroom and indoor pool. Inside, unexpected features surprise and delight at every turn – click here to see more.
A large evergreen tree on-site was preserved during construction.
Our Seattle DADU takes advantage of a small interior city lot to provide overflow entertaining and guest space for an urban family, with the flexibility to be an independent dwelling unit in the future. Cleverly convertible casework stores necessities while hiding clutter, and large sliding doors open the interior to the landscape, making maximum use of a small lot. Get more of the story here.
Our Urban Home Design Process
o Contact us for a consultation to make sure we are the right fit
o We’ll guide you in aligning expectations for scope, schedule and budget with your goals
o Successful projects start – and finish – with strong teams. We’ll help assemble and lead the team that’s the best fit for your project.
o Our variety of design tools, from hands-on to digital, will assist in visualizing and communicating throughout the design process.
Architect in Seattle for City Living
Our Seattle Architecture firm is located on Portage Bay near the University of Washington. Visit our sunny over-water studio to learn more about how we can help make your urban home a reality!
FAQs for Urban Residential Architecture
-
Finding the ‘right size’ for your design—sorting out what to include and what to let go—is an important process for any project, especially in cities where space is limited. ‘While we’re at it…’ is a common phrase early in the design process that can lead to an ever-expanding wish list and cost escalation. Part of our design process is to review your space needs with an eye to efficiency without sacrificing the things that matter most to you. Check out our ‘Rightsizing your Modern Home Design’ blog post to learn more.
Another approach to right-sizing is designing flexible spaces that can be reconfigured for multiple purposes. Our Bend Modern Home adapts and transforms like your favorite multi-tool, opening up to accommodate entertaining and guests, and contracting as needed to feel cozy and private.
-
Thoughtful window placement, size and orientation can help provide light and views where they matter most. Skylights are also a great tool to get light into interior and more private spaces like bathrooms. It is important to balance natural light with artificial light and to provide control of natural light with window coverings that minimize contrast and glare. West- and east-facing orientations often provide a challenge as sun angles can be quite low and hard to control, especially at certain times of the year. Often we need to balance views with glare – always a tricky prospect but a challenge we’ve dealt with in many ways! For example, the living room of our Creek House project has solar roller shades on one side to control glare off the water and bottom-up roman shades on the two other window walls to provide privacy and soft light while preserving views out.
-
City homes can be inundated on all sides by noise from airplanes, roadways, sirens, construction, and other inevitable circumstances of urban living. Triple glazing and careful insulation are two top ways to keep the noise out. Thoughtful landscaping (plants and berms) can help create noise buffers, and locating the most ‘noise sensitive’ spaces (bedrooms, offices, media rooms) away from the largest noise-generators can minimize the impacts of urban noise. More advanced construction techniques, like staggered framing and special acoustical wall systems, can go further to defend against noise intrusion.
-
In addition to traditional single-family front and rear yards, it is possible to use courtyards, decks, balconies and roof decks to carve out your own outdoor space in the city. Spaces need to be well-designed but not necessarily large – paying careful attention to orientation, sunlight and views can allow a right-sized urban outdoor space to be enjoyable in many weather conditions and times of year. Providing strong connections between indoor and outdoor spaces, as in this Seattle Waterfront Home, can make better use of both, extending the reach of indoor rooms and lowering the threshold (literally!) to making good and regular use of outdoor living spaces.