We provided architectural, interior, site design, and entitlement for the Mini Houses: a creative answer to the challenge of how to create attainable housing adjacent to Fayetteville’s 74-acre Walker Park and Senior Center. These four micro-homes were our first experience with building in affordability naturally through small, well-designed and well-located units.

The four fee-simple 520 SF one bedroom / one bathroom homes were built on a lot split of a traditional 50’ x 150’ downtown lot. Our growing city’s downtown has a strong prevalence of households made up of only one or two people, but almost no one- and two-bedroom homes to own. We built the same square footage that you might expect in an infill home on a normal city lot but split up both the square footage and the land cost into four individual mini houses to better fit an under-served demographic and price point. The homes sold for $150,000 each, the cheapest new construction homes downtown in years. They met federal affordability standards for 60% AMI households at the time of first sale, and the mortgage payment for owners was less than half the cost of rent for a one bedroom apartment. The homes were designed to be fully ADA accessible, allowing senior buyers to downsize into a walkable, low-maintenance, age-in-place home. A quirk in zoning code required the units to be built as no more than two attached townhouses, so they were provided with a light hyphen connection in the form of a storage shed to technically meet code while appearing to be detached individual cottages.