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Miami Herald
6 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Miami Herald
Modern day treehouse with its own guest residence lists in California. See it
The idea of a treehouse may bring thoughts of childhood, when you hung out with friends in a makeshift wooden structure that only a selective few could enter. Well, this isn't that. Welcome to an adult's treehouse, which overlooks a popular neighborhood in Los Angeles — and is listed for $2.79 million. 'Modern architectural wonder with a guest house in a prime Silver Lake location!' the listing on Compass says. 'A renovation by Glen Bell, AIA, of DEX Studio landed this modern on Dwell magazine's 'Design Home Tour.' Collaborating with the architect were artists and landscape architects, who produced a high-style, hand-crafted — yet immensely livable — property.' It's a mid-century modern treehouse, a news release calls it, complete with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a guest house with one bedroom, one bathroom. 'This particular home is a work of art. So many of the homes built in the last 20 years have been designed by builders who don't necessarily understand what it means to build specific to a site,' listing agent Victoria Massengale said in the release. 'To experience a home that has been built by an architect who considers how the light is going through the Brise-soleil and stained glass panels or how the breeze is going to move through the home is not only refreshing, but inspiring.' Features, per the listing, include: Amazing viewsDetached 2-car garagePatioWalk-in closet 'This property offers a seamless transition between indoor and outdoor experiences through Bell's understanding of light,' the release says — which is easy to see through the photos. The home is almost a paradox that allows light to seep through the halls, while also keeping it cool with the surrounding greenery. The listing is held by Massengale and Michael Maguire at Compass.
Associated Press
6 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Dwell Magazine Features Sisters Oregon-Based Startup Steel Hut in Recent Article
Founder Marie Saldivar offered a tour of her guesthouse, which served as a proof of concept for Steel Hut SISTERS, OREGON - June 3rd, 2025 - Steel Hut, which offers consumer-ready building plans for Quonset huts, and its founder, Marie Saldivar, were recently featured in an article by Quonset huts are experiencing a resurgence in popularity, offering a cost-effective, easy-to-build alternative to traditional construction and tiny homes. Quonset huts were first used by the military, later becoming a prominent mid-century design for residential builds. Today, they've made a comeback, and Steel Hut makes it easy for people everywhere to make their Quonset hut dreams come true. Steel Hut founder Marie Saldivar is a fourth-generation metal industry innovator and experienced builder, a full-time real estate agent, and a new mom. For five years, she spent countless hours perfecting the Steel Hut building process. 'We live and breathe huts,' said Saldivar . She does more than just design and sell consumer-ready Quonset hut building plans, however. Saldivar has proven she can talk the talk and walk the walk, as evidenced by the stunning home she built as a proof-of-concept for Steel Hut. Her experimental steel arched home was just featured in an article exclusively on In 'Budget Breakdown: Oregon Designer Turns a Quonset Hut into a Guesthouse for $345k', writer Grace Bernard sat down with Saldivar to explore her creativity and inspiration. 'I always take on a bit too much,' said Saldivar at the beginning of the interview, a sentiment that is impressing people from around the world by way of her incredible ready-to-go steel arched building kit plans. On the outside, Saldivar's first Quonset hut, conceived as a mother in law suite, is a breathtaking, unique design of steel and wood conveying 1200 square feet of living space. Concrete pads serve as a porch area and wrap around one side of the home. Sleek and streamlined, this simple yet stunning design would be at home in the city, in the woods, or by the ocean. This one, however, is nestled in a forest, offering a picturesque view. When peering inside, visitors are met with a captivating open space punctuated with clean lines and lots of light streaming in from tall windows. A cozy living area with a wood burning stove awaits, and a practical kitchen and dining room adjoins. The article at Dwell has further details on the story behind Saldivar's first Quonset home and can be found at Steel Hut's pre-fab Quonset hut plans offer the same careful design as this one. Find further details at ABOUT STEEL HUT Steel Hut offers consumer-ready building plans for steel arched building kits, providing sustainability-focused designs to promote healthier communities and environments. Media Contact Company Name: Steel Hut Contact Person: Marie Saldivar Email: Send Email City: Sisters State: OR 97759 Country: United States Website: Source: Oregon Web Solutions
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Disney Is Building Affordable Housing
The entertainment behemoth is set to break ground on a 1,400-unit mixed-income development near Orlando, Florida. Disney has been doing some serious housing development lately. In California's Coachella Valley, the company is creating a luxury community on a 600-acre site with about 1,900 homes to be completed later this year, and has plans for another around double that size outside Raleigh, North Carolina. Both are part of an initiative that "focuses on developing residential communities that integrate [its] brand and experiences into everyday life." As Angela Serratore wrote for Dwell, "homeowners will be able to play pickleball in the shadow of a building meant to resemble one that appears in the (Disney-owned) Pixar film Incredibles 2." Now, just 10 miles north of Disney World outside Orlando, Florida, the company is building affordable housing. A development is set to unfold on 80 acres in Horizon West, a massive master-planned community whose website boasts residents "can view nightly fireworks from [the] Magic Kingdom." The addition will include nearly 1,400 apartments, with 1,000 designated for households with incomes ranging between 50 to 100 percent of the area median income of $90,400. Reportedly, there will be "a mix of building typologies…featuring murals and unique elevations that create a distinct look and feel for each neighborhood within the development." At a meeting last year where Orange County commissioners greenlit the affordable housing project, an attorney representing the corporation and developer said: "Disney is trying to help the teachers, the police officers, the grocery store workers, the hospitality workers and folks who are just starting out in their career, the people who our community depends on every day, to make sure they have a safe and affordable place to live." Presumably, the project will also accommodate staff of the nearby theme park itself, or "cast members" as the company calls them. Disney World happens to be the nation's largest single-site employer, with around 80,000 workers, almost a quarter of the current population of the entire Orlando Metro Area. (Disney did not respond to requests for comment.) The attorney also noted that the development aims to abet the county's affordable housing goals by "bringing forward an innovative and, in this situation, private solution without requesting [public] funding." Indeed, it is one of the state's most ambitious free market affordable housing projects to date, and Disney and the developer, Michaels Organization, the country's largest privately held owner of affordable housing, are absorbing significant impact fees and waiving tax incentives. The project will stand in stark contrast to the Coachella Valley development, where some homes will cost nearly $5 million, and whose development triggered "…an ongoing series of lawsuits against the city of Rancho Mirage, related to the displacement of marginalized and low-income families," according to SFGATE. First proposed in 2022, the project "has been touted as a long-sought contribution from one of the entertainment colossuses that power the Central Florida economy to help solve a housing crisis" for which Disney is partly responsible, says the Orlando Sentinel. Support for the project has been wide-ranging, by groups from the Orlando Regional Realtors Association, to housing advocacy/anti-sprawl group Orlando Yimby, to Habitat for Humanity. "Rising housing costs push our community workforce further from their jobs, increasing commute times, decreasing quality of life for employees, and undermining [their] overall availability and stability," says Catherine Steck McManus, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Greater Orlando & Osceola County. "So, we're encouraged by efforts [of regional] stakeholders, including Disney, to expand affordable housing options that will increase the resilience of our community and economy." But the project has also aroused consternation among many residents and nearby neighbors of Horizon West, which is one of the country's fastest-growing master-planned communities—in one of the country's fastest-growing metros. Some 400 individuals signed petitions opposing the project; and at planning meetings, some bore signs with slogans like "Not the Disney dream, just a corporate scheme." Aside from skepticism about the company's motives, most opponents feel "the project is too big and…worry that the increase in population will negatively impact already existing problems with overcrowded schools, jammed traffic roads, and overwhelmed first responders," according to Central Florida Public Media. Brett Theodos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, suggests the issue be viewed through a longer lens. "Traffic is often a concern with large housing developments," he says. "But if the jobs are coming, the traffic will be even worse with no nearby development, because it means people will be driving further from home to work and back." "Companies are taking an interest in housing production because the affordability issue adversely affects employee recruitment and retention." —Brett Theodos, senior fellow at the Urban Institute Not to mention, affordable housing proposals inevitably arouse concerns around property values and "neighborhood character." As of April, homes in Horizon West were commanding a median price of more than $630,000, according to which is more than $200,000 above an Orlando metro median-priced home. Affordability isn't exactly a historic community attribute—and some want it to stay that way, citing "concerns about decreasing property values and changing the character of the community with low-income housing." But Theodos contends these concerns are shortsighted. "An emerging bipartisan consensus [understands] housing supply is constrained, in large part because of 'not-in-my-backyard' barriers to growth, [which drives up] home prices," he says. "That may feel okay to current homeowners, but what about their kids? Companies are increasingly seeing that they benefit when their employees do too, and we are seeing [them] take an interest in housing production because the affordability issue adversely affects employee recruitment and retention." Of course, there has been a long-standing deficiency of federal government support for affordable housing. With cuts at the federal level, "we have to think about doing practical things at the state and local level," says Henry Cisneros, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, former mayor of San Antonio, and board chair for the Bipartisan Policy Center. As far as Disney is concerned, Cisneros says the company "has experience in building all over the world, whether its theme parks or other venues, and anytime a competent entity…is seeking to explore housing production, frankly, as a former HUD secretary, I encourage it." Top image courtesy of Disney Related Reading: Why Is Disney So Obsessed With Housing? The Legacy of Disney's Monsanto House of the Future
Business Mayor
25-05-2025
- General
- Business Mayor
Can Micro-Units Help Gen Z's Loneliness Epidemic?
Studies show that Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—are not doing great. Having inherited a 'fundamentally broken world,' says Newsweek, Gen Z is dealing with a host of 'social, digital, and developmental factors' that have led them to experience higher levels of loneliness than their elders. Nearly 73 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds report struggling with isolation—and this isn't by accident. As Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic and Dwell contributor Alexandra Lange has expounded on, America is, collectively, terrible at building spaces for young people to meet, hang out, and thrive. Gen Z is encountering a world where stagnant wages have resulted in a failure to launch: 33 percent of adult Gen Zers live with their parents, unable to afford housing away from their childhood bedroom. By not living together, young people miss out on the chance to build deep social ties that can sustain them throughout their adult years. Building more housing—importantly, designing such housing more intentionally to maximize both affordability and social well-being—presents an opportunity to address overlapping housing and mental health crises. The greatest chance to provide a stable and connected future for Gen Z could lie in a small-scale intervention: the micro-unit. Micro- and compact units are typically defined as any living quarters that are half the size of an average unit in the area. They aren't novel inventions; boarding houses, tenements, single resident occupancy hotels (SROs), and more housed America's workers through the 19th and 20th centuries. But much of this housing is now illegal. According to a 2013 Atlantic essay, managing the existence of affordable, small-scale housing was a project of both the well-meaning elites who wanted to reform living conditions of working-class families living in these often poorly maintained buildings, and wealthy residents who didn't want to live next door to them. Eventually many of these working-class units were eliminated entirely. Through building codes and zoning laws, dense, small-scale living was outlawed across U.S. cities; According to nonprofit think tank AEI Housing Center, nearly one million SROs were lost between 1920 and 2000. The result wasn't just historic slum clearances—the effect is still felt today across the market spectrum, where 'we've outlawed the bottom end of the private housing market, driving up rents on everything above it.' This is why many cities are now turning back toward compact living spaces as a means to address a lack of available homes. RentCafe shows that cities like Detroit, St. Paul, and Philadelphia have seen double-digit decreases in overall apartment sizes. A new study by StorageCafe shows that new micro-unit developments are being built in costlier cities in the West; San Francisco, Portland, and Oakland rank at the top for micro-units, but Boston and Newark are also delivering, with 'more than half of their upcoming rental units expected to be compact living spaces.' The trends toward smaller-scale living, says Building Design+Construction, could be attributable to young professionals who are rapidly overtaking the rental market and are willing to trade space for location—and likely, lower costs. As StorageCafe notes, micro-units can deliver 'striking' rent gaps, wherein rents for conventional apartments are almost double than micro-units in places like Newark and Irvine, California. French2D's first micro-housing project in Boston, 1047 Commonwealth, was completed in 2016. It was student housing for several years and has since been converted to market rate units. In Boston, architects Jenny and Anda French, founders of their firm French2D, took on a micro-housing project in the early 2010s. The city had struggled to 'right-size' its housing options as college students were frequently outcompeting families for larger units, says Anda. Though it wasn't yet legal to build such compact units, the architects took advantage of a grandfathered zoning loophole that allowed for SROs, which meant that they could legally build 180 new units ranging from 340 to 400 square feet including large communal spaces, like a library, gym, and public cafe. 'These kinds of flexible spaces that were just part of your living arrangement might just seep out more casually,' she continues. 'People might even leave their doors open a little bit more, and create micro-communities—that was the hope and the ambition.' Read More This Technology Is For The Birds When it was completed in 2016, the building became student housing for several years and has since been converted to market rate units. 'There was a moment where there was enthusiasm for this model; this could be the secret sauce to produce a lot of supply, especially in cities where you are willing to whittle down your personal space because your life is elsewhere,' says Jenny. But what the French sisters took from the project wasn't just the economic possibilities for micro-housing—which, says Anda, some of their Gen Z grad students at Princeton have already marked as being 'co-opted by capital'—but the possibilities for self-governance among residents of compact apartments. The Bay State Cohousing Community is a 30-unit cooperatively-owned and managed development just outside of Boston. 'We've been talking a lot about what a new version of a boarding house could be,' says Anda. 'The mutual agreements, the chore charts, all of the ways in which cohabitation needs to be managed and agreed upon and self determined' are essential. This 'charter,' as they call it, is what differentiates, for instance, a micro-housing development wherein residents simply use their apartment as a sleeping chamber from a loneliness-busting multifamily building where units are, simply, cheaper and smaller than a regular apartment building. When Boston finally began a pilot to legalize compact living arrangements, French 2D helped push for it. To their delight, the city's four-year Compact Living Pilot program ended up requiring a registered governance charter that would speak to how these spaces would be used collectively; this solidified, for Jenny and Anda, the importance of residents cocreating an agreement about how they would live together. 'It was a commitment from the city that they're encouraging the social aspects of micro-housing, because that's the health of the community,' says Anda. Read More A Projector that Borrows from the Rubik's Cube Residents of the French 2D–designed development live in micro-units and share common spaces. They've since gone on to build a 30-unit cooperatively-owned and managed development just outside of Boston, where families live in micro-units (even two and three bedrooms can fall into this category if they're half the size of an average two- or three-bed unit) but share their common spaces—alongside childcare, food prep, and more. Perhaps most Gen Zers don't require communality to such a degree. But a smaller, less-expensive unit combined with opportunities for minor interactions—doing laundry or eating together, or simply keeping one's door ajar—can have an impact on the loneliness epidemic they face. 'Maybe the kind of dovetail with loneliness and isolation is people are looking for ways to push themselves out of that. We see this when people join a micro-housing community: people are doing it to get out of their comfort zone,' explains Jenny. 'Often we think that loneliness is somehow a choice that people are making, instead of a situation that is badly designed.' Top photo of Bay State Cohousing by Naho Kubota, courtesy of French2D. READ SOURCE businessmayor May 23, 2025
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Breuer Building Gets Landmark Status—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week
Can the "abundance movement" solve America's transportation issues? Plus, Spain cracks down on Airbnb listings, the best furniture and decor from New York design week, and more. A burgeoning cadre of thinkers is promoting the idea of abundance to solve America's biggest issues, including health care, energy, and housing: supply, they say, is the panacea. But in terms of transportation, are more cars really an answer? (Bloomberg) The Breuer Building in New York, once home to the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, has been granted landmark status. But that designation only applies to certain parts of the modernist address, and doesn't include its galleries. Here's what the building's new owner, Sotheby's auction house, says it plans to do. (The New York Times) For New York design week, Dwell's senior home guides editor Megan Reynolds popped by the Javits Center to scour its emerging designer showcase. From a spiky jewelry "box" to a loofahlike metal sconce, here's what she uncovered at North America's largest furniture fair. (Dwell) Bad actors in Brooklyn have been bilking homeowners out of deeds through various schemes, and Black and brown residents are particularly at risk. Now, the borough's councilmembers have announced a plan to combat these white-collar criminals and dox them in the process. (Hell Gate) As Spain faces a lack of housing, critics of Airbnb say the short-term rental platform is to blame, with mass demonstrations being held across the country. In response, the government has ordered Airbnb to remove 66,000 listings—but it won't happen overnight. (The New York Times) Top image courtesy
