Texas Gulf Coast Townhouses

2012-2014

The anonymous, nineteenth-century urban houses built in Galveston on long narrow lots served as a model for this speculative housing project in Sunset Heights. The resulting four houses, built on 25-foot wide lots, are 19-feet wide and take advantage of a rear alley for car access thus leaving the front of the houses with porches open to the street for daylight and natural ventilation (when its not too hot). In their lack of decorative detail these new houses echo the “less is enough” ethos of the modest bungalows from the 1920s and 1930s that now surround them, but that are rapidly being demolished in place of larger houses elaborated with a variety of historic styles. The townhouses were built in phases and we experimented with different finishes in each house. This was a design-build project.