Ross Chapin always knew he wanted to build things.
As a kid growing up in rural Minnesota, he often played architect-in-training in the woods near his family’s turn-of-the-century bungalow.
“I really enjoyed making tree houses, bowers in the woods, places I could shape and take part in it,” Chapin said. “To me, it was magic.”
But then came the suburban sprawl and the freeway from nearby St. Paul.
Chapin, who was studying architecture at the University of Minnesota at the time, watched the romance of his family’s neighborhood fall away as tract housing invaded.
“I was devastated,” Chapin said. “I saw places I loved dearly essentially made into Anywhere America. It fired my passion for creating livable communities.”
Indeed, today Chapin, 52, is doing just that and more as one of the most innovative architects of his time. He is known not just in Langley, where he’s designed custom homes, commercial buildings and entire neighborhoods for 25 years, but across the country.
The American Institute of Architects this year honored Ross Chapin Architects with a housing award for the Danielson Grove Neighborhood in Kirkland, a 4-star Built Green development of 16 cottages arranged in connected clusters surrounding garden courtyards and anchored by a commons building, a place for potlucks, family gatherings, meetings or community movie nights.
Danielson Grove is actually one of many “new urbanist” developments under Chapin’s belt, emphasizing a sense of community between neighbors, with parking intentionally clustered off to the side so residents have more “chance interactions” walking home through shared gardens.
In Langley, Third Street Cottages, a similar pocket neighborhood Chapin designed in 1998, earned 10 pages in Sarah Susanka’s hugely popular book, “Creating the Not So Big House.”
“In our society, we have a lot of dysfunction in terms of social systems and social networks. How do neighbors meet each other except on riding lawnmowers on Sunday afternoons?” Chapin said. “We’re isolated in our little kingdoms. Over the decades, we end up to be quite lonely.”
Though Chapin has a new 53-home development in the works, The Highlands at Langley, he also designs singular dwellings.
One of his favorite projects was for Gilbert and Ann Graham on a bluff in Freeland.
They needed a retirement home that would allow them to entertain family as well as to pursue their hobbies of woodworking and art.
Instead of building a new house, Chapin helped the couple expand a previous house he had designed on the property by about 200 square feet. For their hobbies and guests, he suggested a second hybrid space, including a living room that could double as an art studio, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchenette and a small attached woodshop.
“I said, ‘OK, don’t have one larger house,” Chapin said. “Develop a guest house-art studio. Then that creates a garden room between them. My belief is that the natural environment should be completely integral to the built environment.”
Graham said the arrangement, less than 2,000 square feet of living space in all, has been ideal, not just for guests, who love having privacy, but for their daily living.
“It gets us outside. We get up, get dressed, come over here. We enjoy that,” Graham said, basking in the gorgeous, light-filled guest house. “It really met our expectations. This was a home run.”
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