Even as Andrew and Hannah Linn were moving into their first home, in Washington, D.C., in late 2015, the soon-to-be-newlyweds were hunting for the next. Their small apartment “was the perfect place for that moment, but we never even pretended that it was the forever place,” says Hannah, the director of operations for a consulting firm. Within months the couple narrowed their search down to empty lots that would allow them to fully express themselves, although Hannah also remembers, “It quickly became crystal clear just how few ground-up opportunities there are here.”

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Hannah’s parents were keeping tabs from New York on real estate listings in D.C., too, and her mom eyed a pending change to local zoning that would allow new development on lots in the city’s 3,200 or so alleys. Until 1930s-era “slum clearance” erased them, small buildings on these backstreets housed more than 20,000 people. With the updated regulations scheduled to take effect in fall 2016, Hannah’s mom urged her daughter and son-in-law to explore the new pool of residential properties, and by the following year the couple had a contract to purchase a 1,900-square-foot alley lot around the corner from Congressional Cemetery.

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Andrew cofounded the architecture practice Bldus with his undergrad classmate Jack Becker in 2013, and his home quest with Hannah coincided with the business partners’ maturing research into regenerative design, or creating buildings that benefit the environment and human well-being as opposed to just lessening the planetary damage of new construction. Andrew says that although Bldus’s residential clients are universally interested in buildings that perform efficiently and have toxin-free interiors, “a bank that doesn’t want to finance an unconventional construction method or a builder who resists learning about a newer product” can still prevent a project from realizing its full environmental potential. The alley gave Andrew and Jack the opportunity to create the healthiest home they could conceive.

It also offered more space for the Linns to grow into, though making the most of it required some iterating on Bldus’s part. “The maximum size of an alley residence is 80 percent of lot coverage, but the actual size of a house is also dictated by setbacks,” Jack explains.

“As an architecture practice, we like to find the simplest solutions for things—but we also pursue solutions that subvert the normal.”
—Andrew Linn, designer and resident

Working within those parameters, he and Andrew arrived at a two-story building with a square footprint. They pulled the second floor five feet beyond the ground floor on the west side to maximize interior square footage, and the cantilever now provides cover for a parking spot. Andrew adds that in D.C.’s dense street grid, setbacks are no guarantee of privacy, so the designers traced the property lines with a picket fence made of sassafras to shield first-floor windows from prying eyes. To compensate for daylighting lost to the fence, they treated the center of the house like an atrium, with sunshine coming in through a skylight and cascading through a suspended net-cum-playscape.

“The form is a modification of the Roman domus. Honoring that precedent made sense in a classically inspired city,” Andrew says of the skylit area, which meets the ground floor in a living space flanked by the kitchen and a multipurpose den. “Andy and Jack did an incredible job of making us the best family we can be,” Hannah says, “by surrounding us in gathering and cooking and play.”

The designers wrapped the family in all their research as well. The house is the first residence on the East Coast to be constructed with a bamboo wall system, and its cavities are filled with wool for insulation. Because this tight envelope works in tandem with efficient building systems, the Linns paid only $30 for utilities this past August. Just as the house’s underlying structure leans toward the organic, so too do the finishes. The outward face of the bamboo is clad in poplar bark panels, interior walls are finished in nontoxic coatings such as milk paint and hemp oil, and many other surfaces sport natural substances. The house emits no new-car aroma—though the sassafras fencing does smell like root beer after a rainstorm—and Hannah surmises that the clean indoor air has been a boon for the Linns’ infant son as he establishes a sleep schedule. “You get the hang of it,” Andrew says of finding products with regenerative aims in mind, “and the result is a joy to live in.”

Another joyful result: the headway that Andrew and Jack are making in Washington, D.C. Bldus is helping to define the next generation of the alley house, with three such projects now in the works. The studio has also begun training new construction partners in the ways of bamboo wall systems so that the lessons held in this house spread far beyond it.

Project Credits:

Architecture & Builder: BLDUS

Interior Design: BLDUS

Civil Engineering: Huska Consulting

Structural Engineering: JZ Engineering

Lighting Design: BLDUS

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In Washington, D.C., a Back Alley Becomes a Sustainable Haven