South Seattle DADU

About This Project

Like many West Coast cities, Seattle is facing a severe housing shortage at a time when labor and material costs have skyrocketed. Combined with a lack of available dirt, housing vacancy rates stubbornly hover under 5%.

A response to this housing perfect storm has been the evolution of a new housing prototype called the Detached Auxiliary Dwelling Unit (DADU). Elsewhere, this is commonly referred to as a Mother-in-Law (MIL) unit. As the name implies, this is a small, self-contained housing type that allows for additional housing to be built on an existing lot, creating greater density within our urban fabric. Generally thought of as either starter housing or aging-in-place concepts, these are extremely efficient floor plans that squeeze all the basic living functions into a compact space while envisioning the urban fabric as one's living room. In the case of our little DADU, our footprint is 20' x 20' and provides a ground level garage/music studio and an upper level apartment.

The misconception of these structures - thanks in large part to the misinformation campaign of the Not-So-Big-House movement - is that smaller translates into cheaper. Since these are essentially small houses with kitchens, bathrooms and all utilities, the truth is these are very expensive structures on a cost/sf basis. We conceptualized this structure as inexpensively as we could think of and it still ended up costing more than $400,000 or around $500/sf.

Project Year: 2018
Project Cost: $200,001 - $500,000
Country: United States
Zip Code: 98118