(Re)generation House | St. Paul, Minnesota | 2020

Architects: Salmela Architect
Client: Thomas Fisher and Claudia Wielgorecki
Contractor: Cates Fine Homes
Photographers: Corey Gaffer 

The architects’ clients, a professor, and his wife, approached us after purchasing a rundown bungalow across the alley from their home of 24 years in St. Paul, Minnesota. They envisioned a new home that could serve as a prototype for how to achieve compact, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly infill housing within aging urban core neighborhoods.

The previous single-story 700sf Sears Roebuck bungalow sat on a compact 20ft wide foundation wall.

The 1ft thick concrete walls was repaired and reused, eliminating costly excavation and allowing the surrounding trees, landscape, and neighborly relationships to remain undisturbed.

The new structure cantilevers 2 feet off of each side, increasing the footprint by approximately 100sf and allowing all of the critical living functions to fit on the main floor.

A critical requirement was that the design enables aging in-place, an issue that will become increasingly relevant in the coming decades.

The main living space is oriented toward the backyard with views across the alley to their previous home, where their oldest daughter’s family now lives.

The kitchen, dining, and living areas share a common room with a 20ft ceiling over the sitting area.

The double-height volume makes the compact space feel generous while helping articulate and organize the dining and kitchen areas around it.

A bedroom, laundry closet, and accessible bathroom face the pollinator-friendly front yard.

An open front porch with slatted side walls greets the street with a welcoming yellow rear wall that serves as a partition to an enclosed screen porch facing the backyard.

The screen porch acts as an extension of the living room in the summer, allowing cool air from the shaded side yard to drift into the house.

The exterior is clad in economical, durable, and maintenance-free corrugated and standing-seam metal panels, finished in a medium grey that recedes in to its shaded site while matching the muted colors of its neighbors. The compact massing is defined by an asymmetrical gable roof.

The south slope is set at the optimal solar angle for the 5.2 kW solar array that powers the house.

On sunny days, the house produces excess energy, which is stored in a house battery.

Energy self-sufficiency allowed the clients to cap their gas line at the street, eliminating fossil fuels as an energy source.

The north slope is set at a shallower angle to allow for a generous main bedroom with sufficient head height and ample storage space.

The gable peak sits 16ft above the upstairs hallway, which doubles as a bright, lofty reading room.

Windows of various sizes are placed in seemingly random compositions across each building face.

In actuality, the size and placement of each window respond to specific functional desires.

Whenever possible, the clients wanted to direct views toward the sky and mature tree canopy rather than into neighboring living spaces, creating an almost cabin-like experience in the city.

In the “century of the city,” our urban housing stock is energy inefficient and deteriorating.

The population is aging, and our reliance on fossil fuels has reached a breaking point.

This compact 1,400sf, 3-bed, 2-bath, solar-powered, carbon-free, age in-place home addresses a number of impending crises with optimism and exuberance using a toolkit of design strategies that can be replicated on any site with adaptability toward the unique needs, desires, and personalities of just about anyone.