broadway housing - sacramento, california

Broadway Housing is a compact urban infill development on a long-vacant, L-shaped parcel in the southernmost part of Sacramento’s Richmond Grove district.  Organized as a cluster of nine single family homes along Broadway and Yale Street, the design addresses the very different urban conditions and building typologies surrounding the site, mediating between the loosely spaced, predominantly commercial structures on busy Broadway and the dense, low-rise homes on quiet Yale Street. 

The three homes on Broadway are three-story buildings, their height adding a robust urban presence to the currently fragmented street edge and taking advantage of the unobstructed southern views that the site affords. Sitting on ground floor garage plinths, the main living spaces of the Broadway homes are elevated to the second and third floors to increase privacy and provide separation from the heavy vehicular traffic on Broadway.  In contrast, the six two-story houses on Yale Street adopt the more modest scale and massing of the existing homes lining the residential street, their landscaped front yards and generously glazed elevations engaging and activating the sidewalk not unlike the traditional neighbors with their front porches and large living room windows.

Designed around an ambitiously limited construction budget, the buildings each offer 1,500 square feet of living space and are organized as a series of volumes shifted against one another, resulting in carefully articulated building forms that animate the street and echo the additive character and finer architectural grain of the surrounding building stock.  The houses on Broadway consist of a clean, monolithic base volume that supports and interlocks with a partially cantilevered two-story wood-clad cube above.  The two-story houses on Yale Street follow a similar morphological strategy; here, an elongated wood box is embedded in the building’s rectangular body, forming a cantilevered upper-level bay that sets up a carefully proportioned, volumetric rhythm along the street. 

The restrained material palette – wood, cementitious stucco, and the black poly-ash siding of entry and garage bays – aesthetically ties together the individual buildings on Broadway and Yale as one recognizable ensemble of contemporary homes. The exterior is complemented by window walls inserted into the wood boxes; facing both Broadway and Yale Street, floor-to-ceiling apertures alternate with shifting wall panels, their saturated light-orange color a buoyant nod to the vitality of this rapidly evolving Sacramento neighborhood.