change agent

Langley, Wash., a beach town on Whidbey Island, is the kind of place that draws outsiders. An hour north of Seattle, tourists arrive here by the boatload to watch the orcas feeding in Puget Sound, to spot migrating gray whales in springtime, or to take in the restaurants, shops, and galleries of this pristine village, population 1,000. Ross Chapin, AIA, was a tourist who passed through Langley in the late 1970s. A few years later he came to stay, attracted as much to its strong sense of community as to its panoramic views of Saratoga Passage and the Cascade Mountains. In the past decade, though, Langley has struggled with the growing pains common to all prosperous towns. Big residential developers are beginning to eye the area, and while Chapin bemoans the sad “spaghetti bowl of cul-de-sacs and beige boxes” they usually bring with them, he doesn't care much for pitched NIMBY battles. Instead, living and working in such an unspoiled spot has inspired him to come up with housing solutions that preserve small-town style and scale, changing local zoning ordinances if necessary.

Chapin knows that the loose edges of towns, with their mind-numbing mazes of streets, cannot be improved simply by sending out talented architects. Innovative solutions must come from better planning. So he's teamed up with ace developer Jim Soules to create The Cottage Company, a Seattle-based residential development firm that specializes in what the pair calls pocket neighborhoods—sensibly sized houses and lots that share a courtyard garden. In 1998 they completed their first joint project, Third Street Cottages, which consists of eight exquisitely detailed homes in an existing Langley neighborhood originally zoned for four larger houses. It sold out immediately, and within months the national press picked up the story. Since then, Chapin has completed eight other pocket neighborhoods throughout the Northwest with The Cottage Company or other developers. Last year, the partners' Greenwood Avenue Cottages, in Shoreline, Wash., won a national AIA Housing Committee Award.

Photo: Danny Turner

On his Web site, Chapin calls these cottages “the equivalent of the Mini Cooper—small, sensual, well-engineered, and reliable.” And indeed, just as the Mini's market appeal is its design and performance, Chapin doesn't use the D word when discussing the cottage concept, even though it is denser than the typical new-home development. He wants to make these homes so inviting that people who can afford more space actually choose less. When they're offered an intimate neighborhood with carefully articulated public and private spaces, he believes people will choose quality over quantity, and a street-friendly approach to security over a gated community of big houses and big yards. “I'm trying to create models other people can step into, take for a spin, and be inspired by,” he says. “Hopefully a homebuyer can walk into a house that's 1,000 square feet, metaphorically kick the tires, and say, ‘Oh, this isn't that small.' Or they'll say, ‘I couldn't live in anything this size, but it makes me think about how much time and money I spend taking care of my house.'”

Few would question the need to broaden the housing palette. Chapin points out that demographic statistics put the number of one-person U.S. households at roughly 40 percent, and 60 percent are one- and two-person households. That's a large group of people for whom a big home on a 7,000-square-foot lot may not make sense in terms of space, money, or time spent on upkeep. By offering a detached alternative to townhouses and condos in single-family neighborhoods, he aims to provide the missing link between home and a spirit of camaraderie that both multifamily dwellings and 250-home suburban subdivisions ignore.

Courtesy Ross Chapin

“Most zoning is for suburban development, not community,” says Chapin, who grew up in a small town north of St. Paul, Minn., in a shingled bungalow on a lake. It seems poetic that he ended up here in Langley—the first municipality in the Northwest to adopt the Cottage Housing Development provision, and perhaps the smallest town in the U.S. with a design review board. And yet, it is perfectly logical, in the way that people return to the values with which they were raised. His grandfather built the house Chapin lived in as a boy; his sister owns it now. “I was growing up in a location that had a very strong sense of place,” he says. “I got to know the history of the neighborhood and the people who'd lived for generations in the same place. My grandmother would talk about when she was young, sitting in the crook of a particular tree, and [she would] point to the tree and say, ‘Look how big it is now.'” When I looked at trees, I saw them not just as trees but as a continuum of life.”

Fast forward to the early 1970s, when Chapin saw his hometown suffer the fate of other traditional settlements. As the freeways came out from St. Paul, the first waves of suburbia lapped the edges of the small town. Thousands of cookie-cutter houses went up in what used to be cornfields, and the town center began to decline as more and more people settled close to the shopping centers that were sprouting.

Courtesy Ross Chapin Conover Commons, phase one, is organized around Chapin's trademark child- and dog-friendly village green. The homes' fiber-cement siding, painted cedar battens, and Dutch-cut wood doors are updated versions of Northwest vernacular architecture.

It's a familiar story, but Chapin says the loss hit home as he was heading off to architecture school at the University of Minnesota. “My grandfather would walk in the woods; my dad played there, and I played there,” he says. “When the ravine was filled in and the creek was straightened and put in a culvert, and houses went up, I felt almost a pain in my body.” So he went off to college, determined to create memorable places that respond to history, neighborhood, the sun, and the contour of the land. “To me it was play,” Chapin says of learning to make architecture. “It was all about not only form, but about people and relationships and detailing so that I could feel a place come alive when I would draw.”

These pocket cottages are quaint in the best sense of the word. Their welcoming porches, flower boxes, and Craftsman details are strikingly familiar, with references to Northwest vernacular architecture and echoes from across the Pacific. But the compositions are contemporary, and might include a glassy tower or second-story terrace. When designing them, Chapin says he thinks about the deeply practical choices a farmer or shopkeeper might make. Some houses have a lively combination of shed and gable roofs, as though they were added onto over the years. And the details are never a pastiche. Deep eaves, cedar battens, and wide covered porches are indispensable for keeping out the Northwest drizzle. “I like to make houses as fresh as possible—not novel or gimmicky, but in a way that brings out the delight of the place,” Chapin says. “What I'm going for is vitality and life, and it's not so much a mental aesthetic as a felt character and beauty.”

Courtesy Ross Chapin Each of the 12 cottages at Conover Commons in Redmond, Wash., is less than 1,000 square feet, so socializing often spills into the commons building. Its columns, beams, and paneling come from maple and fir trees on the land. One of the first buildings in the state to achieve zero net energy, its photovoltaic panels power the building and light the commons area.

The unprecedented appeal of these diminutive neighborhoods has led to knockoffs by other developers, who often miss the defining idea that makes Chapin's work so successful—the way the site layout encourages social interaction while protecting personal boundaries. At Danielson Grove, a Cottage Company project in Kirkland, Wash., garages sit outside the commons, so residents walk through a shared courtyard to get to their houses. The courtyard is bordered by perennials and a low fence, providing a friendly edge between the commons and private yards. Flower boxes on shaded porches add another low-key boundary, and Dutch front doors offer the possibility for informal visiting. And one side of each nesting house has high windows, ensuring privacy between neighbors.

Chapin coined the term “pocket neighborhood” to refer to infill projects—New Urbanism on a smaller scale. Most of his developments slip into existing neighborhoods and consist of a dozen homes or less, ranging from 700 square feet to 1,000 square feet. “When we build, we need to build in clusters of natural, relatable households rather than trying to see how many houses we can fit on a property,” he says. “This isn't about density. If you map out the aliveness of an area, and the relationship to connections, and color them in terms of their strength, I suggest that in a standard big development, the colors are going to be weak. We're trying to create a map that's as colorful and rich as possible.”