Building With Style: An Urban House

Recently, my family and I sadly decided to leave our Victorian house in Cambridge, because it needed major renovations and we needed to reduce our mortgage. Before settling in Arlington, a neighboring town, we made a stab at acquiring a vacant lot in Cambridge. I won’t describe the fantastic development strategies we had to work out to make an offer (which was then rejected by the sellers). But I would like to present the design I developed for this fairly typical urban lot. The Program At 48 feet wide by roughly 100 feet deep, the lot was fairly narrow, and long. So a typical urban house developed: narrow and long, with the narrow end toward the street. The townhouse development rules let