Flintlock provided architectural, interior, site design, and entitlement for the Mini Houses: a creative answer to the challenge of how to create attainable housing adjacent to Fayetteville’s 74-acre Walker Park and Senior Center.
The four fee-simple 520 SF one bedroom / one bathroom homes were built on a lot split of a traditional 50’ x 150’ downtown lot. Our growing city’s downtown has a strong prevalence of households made up of only one or two people, but almost no one- and two-bedroom homes to own. We built the same square footage that you might expect in an infill home on a normal city lot but split up both the square footage and the land cost into four individual mini houses to better fit an under-served demographic and price point. The homes sold for $150,000 each, the cheapest new construction homes downtown in years. The cost to own them is nearly half that of the average one-bedroom apartment rental only a few years later. The homes were designed to be fully ADA accessible, allowing senior buyers to downsize into a walkable, low-maintenance, age-in-place home.
Front garden beds are small enough to be a hobby and not a burden. A community garden across the street provides optional supplement.
A single parking space slots into the use easement between units, on the uphill side to allow for adaptability to future wheelchair accessible entry. A quirk in zoning code required the units to be built as no more than two attached townhouses, so they were provided with a light hyphen connection in the form of a storage shed to technically meet code while appearing to be detached individual cottages.
