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Good buildings deliver value to their owner, great buildings also deliver it to their community. Our work prioritizes place over object, people over cars, and character over style. The greatest aspiration we have is to make buildings that last simply because people love having them around.
ACT ONE TOWNHOUSE
Beginning in the Spring of 2019, the Scott Family began planning the construction of a courtyard townhouse project on School Avenue in Fayetteville. Working with MBL Planning, the client outlined a vision for the project that would make it one of very few true examples of “Missing Middle Housing” to be constructed downtown in the last 50 years.
The project resulted in two five-plex townhouse buildings that are both familiar and innovative in their historic downtown context. The buildings are dignified but not ostentatious, instead allowing nearby civic landmarks such as TheatreSquared and the Walton Arts Center to take Center Stage. The new project, lovingly called Act One in honor of its theatrical neighbors, provides housing just footsteps away from Fayetteville’s best amenities on the Cultural Arts Corridor, while providing rental income for the Scott Family.
The design team delivered the buildings at a very affordable (2020) rate of approximately $135 per square foot by skillfully navigating overlapping code regimes. The townhomes are surface parked, and have no elevators or fire suppression systems, yet they achieve a density of 40 units per acre.
The project stands as a testament to the lasting value of long-forgotten and now recently-remembered missing middle housing types.
HAWTHORNE HEIGHTS
SPRING & LOCUST APARTMENTS
Downtown Fayetteville is well-known as one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Arkansas. However, despite a best-in-class downtown masterplan calling for a full range of missing-middle housing, the area has been mostly subject to the extremes of development products - large expensive single family homes and mega-apartment projects with huge parking garages.
MBL proposed something different. Leveraging our experience with small and medium scale urban housing types, our design studio produced a building that respects the 2-3 story scale of downtown, while providing our client with a nearly unprecedented (for Fayetteville) 75 units on one acre. We accomplished this without the use of expensive podiums or parking garages - everything is surface parked, and the building is only 3-stories with no elevators.
The building respects hyper-local design traditions. Beloved historic buildings in the surrounding blocks feature a mix of inter-war modern syles, including elements of deco and industrial detailing. The building’s design utilizes these elements along with interior courtyards, cast stone stoops, cordons, lintels, and cornices that signal the urban evolution of downtown.
Understanding the role design plays in the public’s perception of new housing is critical to building positive consensus around market-rate infill. Context sensitive design is the ultimate ‘big tent’, with enough room for both concerned neighbors and for-profit developers.
The building is in the entitlement process and scheduled for construction in 2024.
COBBLESTONE FARMS
MBL partnered with a large team that includes non-profits, religious leaders, farmers, and an affordable housing developer to bring a unique affordable housing project to West Fayetteville. In a collaborative effort, MBL led the design team through the master planning process, detailing spatial relationships between neighborhood residential, a church facility, a non-profit retail establishment, and a community farm. The plan prioritizes public spaces, bringing neighbors together around shared community amenities. MBL led the design team into architectural development of buildings within the community using the same prototypical approach we pioneered in our award winning Pattern Zones projects. Beginning with a basic palette of building types, architectural details and careful siting bring both variety and identity to the neighborhood. All buildings were designed according to the Arkansas Usability Standards in Housing, which protect residents of affordable housing developments by going far beyond typical Fair Housing and building code standards. The project is currently under construction and slated for completion in 2024.
PATRIOT PARK
MBL used context-sensitive design to help navigate a complex web of City, County, and State agencies and bring affordable housing to veterans in the City of Fayetteville AR. Patriot Park had been in concept for many months with different architects, struggling to gain support from key stakeholders among several overlapping layers of government. MBL was brought in to re-imagine the project and bring everyone together around a shared vision. Beginning with urban site design, MBL moved the project away from previous plans that called for a large garden style apartment building on the heavily sloping site. MBL instead proposed a series of nine separate walkup buildings, each situated at a different elevation along the sloping terrain. The smaller buildings also allowed the project to fit in with the surrounding single-family neighborhood and architecturally respond to different frontage conditions that include both a significant commercial arterial as well as sleepy neighborhood streets. Using the same prototypical approach MBL pioneered in it’s award-winning Pattern Zones projects, the firm designed a variegated series of high-efficiency walkup apartment buildings according to the Arkansas Usability Standards in Housing, which protect residents of affordable housing developments by going far beyond typical Fair Housing and building code standards. The project is currently under construction and slated for completion in 2024.
CENTER STREET
HAWTHORNE GROVE
Spring & Locust Early Concept
Multi-Family Concept
72 units/acre
Multi-Family Concept
102 units/acre
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