Photos by Wing Ho
Unique families require unique housing solutions—take Rebecca’s family, for instance. In addition to working full time, Rebecca is also a poet who long dreamed of “a room of her own,” as Virginia Woolf famously wrote. Her husband composes and performs electronic music, arriving home after 2 a.m. and sleeping during the day. Their 21-year-old son, who is autistic, lives at home and loves loud music, just like his dad. “Each of us has opposite schedules and a different bedtime,” Rebecca says. And while the family loved their northeast Minneapolis house, they were running out of space. In fact, Rebecca and her son were sharing a bedroom.
After exploring options for an accessory dwelling unit with Minneapolis-based Keep, an architecture and design firm, the family first decided on a simple backyard writing studio for Rebecca. Keep’s founders, Austin and Kotono Watanabe, along with their friends, built the shed using structural insulated panel construction during the pandemic. The studio worked as “an emergency stop gap,” Rebecca says. But the family still had only one upstairs bathroom for three people, and Rebecca and her son needed their own bedrooms.
Keep’s solution was to plug a new bathroom into the existing mudroom (keeping a door to the outside and a place for shoes) and attach 4 linear feet of hall or breezeway that connects to a 100-square-foot addition with a bedroom and loft reading nook. Tall ceilings, white walls, large windows, poplar-wood trim, and storage tucked into the knuckle where the breezeway connects the bedroom to the house allow the addition to sit lightly in the backyard. Like Rebecca’s writing studio, the addition also has shed roofs and dark vertical siding—putting both of Rebecca’s spaces in conversation with each other.
Having lived in Japan, Rebecca loves her clean, minimalist addition. “It’s all mine,” she says, “[designed] in my aesthetic, with my clothes, books, and art.” She has a wall pulldown desk where she writes when she doesn’t want to venture outside. And yet, “Everyone in the family uses the space; they love it so much,” she adds. The reading nook above the bedroom “is the lounge spot during the day where we gather to talk. We use it more than our living room!”
Small Space, Big Impact
This addition is a case study in maximizing small spaces and intentional living for minimal cost. Plugging the bathroom inside the existing footprint, while adding the bedroom and loft to the existing home, allowed Keep to increase the home’s square footage and value. “The process was an opportunity to identify priorities and fine-tune the design to what was truly necessary,” says Austin. The result allows the family to stay in the home they love—together and apart.
