- Project Type: Cohousing, Multi Family
- Location: Houston, Texas
Located on a vacant commercial site in the East End of Houston, this community is the first cohousing group to bring a project to fruition in Texas. A large part of that success lies in the team: David Kelly, Concept Neighborhoods; development consulting from CoHousing Solutions; sales support from CoVision Consulting; and skillful architecture and design workshops from Caddis, but equal credit goes to the passionate and dauntless future members.
The community participated in a community design workshop process that persevered through the pandemic. As a result, the design reflects who the community members are and what they want as well as the climate and urban context. The community wished to emphasize communitas, comfortable and healthy living, Low Impact Development (LID) principles, and energy efficiency.
The resulting 52,000-square-foot building includes 33 units on the 1.5 acre site. The building wraps the site’s perimeter to create a great street frontage as well as an amazing private central gathering space, with paseos creating permeability from the public realm to the commons. All of the upper floor units are accessed by a wide, exterior walkway with gathering nodes.
CoHousing Houston is located on a previously developed infill site. Regenerating the urban parcel in a way that integrates human and natural life is central to the design. The result is a design that reconciles the interdependence of the natural environment and human well-being.
Sustainability goals were important to the future residents as well as the development and sales team, so the project design strove for net-zero energy and low carbon emissions. The project creates an innovative eco-district, getting its energy for shared heating and cooling from a geothermal system that serves all of the units together. The exterior walkways and buildings have a shared photovoltaic system, which provides heating and cooling energy and charges electric vehicles. The site configuration and landscaping were driven by advanced LID practices and include native and food producing plantings. The “One Health” framework used throughout the planning, design, construction, restoration, operations, and maintenance of the community builds in capacity and resilience.
For more on the way Caddis has designed with nature at CoHousing Houston and at other sites, read our blog post “Designing with Nature: Biodiverse Design in Caddis Projects.”
Caddis PC worked with local architect English + Associates Architects Inc., to continue the design process.
