161 Cushing Street - Renovation

The owner's goal was simple to say and hard to achieve: obtain a building permit by right, without lengthy zoning relief, for a two-family house in a dense Cambridge neighborhood that, in our words to the city, needed renovating desperately.

Cambridge's floor area limits left almost no room to grow. We developed two schemes: one lowered the roof to eliminate the attic; the other kept the existing footprint with no exterior additions at all. The owner chose the less invasive path, and we even redesigned the front deck so its side wall and roof would not count toward floor area.