MENLO PARK BUNGALOW

Project scope: New two-bedroom, two-bath home (900 square feet)
Construction completed:‍ ‍Winter 2008

Built at the back of a lot shared with another building, this ADU — a detached accessory dwelling unit — needed to be compact yet capacious enough to accommodate a single professional, a couple, or a small family. And it needed the homey charm of the early 20th-century bungalow to attract the ideal tenant.

As the bungalow in part came into being as an economical and space-savvy style — one of the reasons it became the home of choice in the 1920s and '30s — it was the ideal model to meet both the needs of the client and the spatial restrictions of the lot. Practical requirements accounted for, it’s the bungalow’s unique characteristics that mark it in our cultural mind’s eye as a style iconic of “home”: generous front porches, exaggerated structural elements: heavy posts, exposed beams, bands, brackets, and corbels; natural materials throughout — wood, plaster, shingles — and all at a human scale.