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Katrina Cottage VIII
Designed by Steve Mouzon
Silver Spring, Maryland Katrina Cottage VIII is the first Katrina Kernel Cottage to be built. Most tiny cottages don't grow very well because wall space gets used up so quickly for cabinets, bathrooms, closets, etc., but Katrina Kernel Cottages are designed from the beginning to grow easily. Katrina Cottage VIII is also exceptionally green, able to achieve a LEED Gold or LEED Platinum rating, depending on where it is installed within a city and also how it is installed within its lot. Click here to find out about the Katrina Cottage VIII Green Features. Katrina Cottage VIII was built against a hard deadline of USA Weekend's Make A Difference Day. There were a number of obstacles along the way that made the task exceptionally difficult. The cottage was finished in Maryland by a crew that was living in a hotel over 1,000 miles from home, and working outdoors late into rainy or freezing nights to get it done... and to get it done like no housing manufacturer has ever done before. It would be fair to characterize their efforts as heroic. Click here for images of the People That Built Katrina Cottage VIII, taken both in the factory in Reserve, Louisiana, and also at the site in Montgomery County, Maryland. The USA Weekend Katrina Cottage was also built as a result of generous donations of material and time from a number of participants listed on the Katrina Cottage VIII Sponsors page. The following is the timeline of how Katrina Cottage VIII came about... more will be added to this evolving story as there is time to write it... currently, the architect (who is the author of the timeline below) is in Washington working to help finish the cottage. Click here for a Slide Show with more images of the construction of Katrina Cottage VIII. Katrina Cottage VIII Timeline
Stephen A. Mouzon Late September 2005
Andres Duany asked me to put out a call for manufacturable tiny cottages in the days just after the hurricane, and many architects and designers responded. But while most of them were quite clever in many ways, few were easily expandable because of the fact that as cottages become smaller, the wall space becomes more precious for cabinets, closets, bath fixtures, etc. Andres was happy with much of what he saw with this exception.
October 2005
I decided to take an entirely different approach, building expandability into the core of the house design. I did a sketch that established four "grow zones," one at each corner, from which windows could become doors leading to wings that were added later. Everything else in the plan was built around the Grow Zones. A few days before the landmark mega-charrette in Biloxi, I did a quick sketch outlining the idea, intending to develop it into a new type of Katrina Cottage at the charrette. The charrette was held October 11-18, 2005.
This is not a big public participation meeting, but rather just the design team meeting at the beginning of the charrette. At around 200 members, this team was approximately seven times the size of any charrette team ever before assembled:  Nearly all my time at the charrette, however, was spent either on FEMA or public relations issues, so the idea didn't get developed. During the months immediately after the charrette, my schedule was jammed with many Katrina-related things, including organizing the Manufactured Architecture program for Katrina Cottages and writing and publishing the Gulf Coast Emergency House Plans book. So the little Katrina Cottage with Grow Zones sat on the shelf... but it wasn't forgotten. I would pull it out sometimes late at night and realize all over again how unconventionally well the Grow Zone idea worked. But still, there was no time to develop it. April 22, 2006
I was one of a large number of Guild volunteers and others working at DPZ's charrette for the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. Saturday, over lunch at a little sandwich shop in the Marigny Faubourg, Ben Brown laid out the framework of the USA Weekend idea.
Saturday's lunch spot in the Marigny:  I was stunned. The Katrina Cottage idea had received tremendous publicity, especially since Marianne Cusato's Katrina Cottage I (designed the first day of the Biloxi mega-charrette) was built for the Builders' Show in Orlando in January. Finally, people could see what we had been talking about. Google "Katrina Cottage" and you'll get hundreds of thousands of hits, but few like this. Over 30 million readers is a huge audience for a single article, even when it's about something as newsworthy as Katrina Cottages. I quickly accepted Ben's invitation to design the USA Weekend cottage. He laid out the timeline, which included a mini-charrette in Washington and lots of time for finding a lot and locating a recipient. May, 2006 Through Today
Mike Watkins is a dear friend of mine, so this is a bit biased, but Mike, who has nothing whatsoever to gain from the USA Weekend Katrina Cottage began just after the Gentilly charrette to donate hour after hour of his time and his people's time to the USA Weekend cottage. Mike is a Director of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, which is headquartered in Miami. Mike runs the Washington Regional Office, which is located in the Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Mike and his staff spent countless hours working to tie down a site and a recipient of the USA Weekend Katrina Cottage from the beginning until this day.
July 16, 2006
USA Weekend wanted three exterior designs from which their readers could choose their favorite. It also needed to be consistent with architecture of the metro DC region, where the USA Katrina Cottage would be located. Many would consider this a grab-bag of architectural styles, but I had been working for several years on an idea called the Classical/Vernacular Spectrum. The Spectrum does three things very well: it categorizes architecture from the most classical (refined) to the most vernacular (organic.) It allows us to make sense of these seemingly opposite things that move us so differently, like the unabashed charm of a simple vernacular farmhouse versus the elegant beauty of an impossibly classical county courthouse. And above all, it allows us to love each end of the Spectrum equally well for their merits. So I spent Sunday the 16th researching everything from the rural charm of Gunston Hall to the colonial urbanity of Alexandria. Here are photos of some of the places that inspired me:
Gunston Hall's simple, all-red outbuildings (in this case, the plantation schoolhouse) were much of the inspiration for the Vernacular cottage design:  Simple horizontal board railings, like these in Alexandria, are a much more common occurrence in the region than elsewhere:  Porch beam & eave details on this Gunston Hall outbuilding was one of the influences for the Median design:  This Alexandria porch drove much of the porch of the Classical design:  July 17 & 18, 2006
Monday was D-Day for the USA Weekend Katrina Cottage design. Mike Watkins, true to form, offered his office for my design work. Quite frankly, I never believe that a great idea dies. July 17, 2006 was proof again of this notion. The most versatile Katrina Cottage idea, which had lain dormant on the shelf for nine months, was birthed in just one day. Because the idea deserved it, I worked all day until the last DPZ employee left at nightfall on development of the floor plan. Here's the floor plan:
 As you can see, it's loaded with unusual features, some obvious and others not so obvious. Here's a list of some of the things this cottage can do: A. Because the core of the cottage was designed to grow in eight directions, it became Katrina Kernel Cottage I. A Kernel Cottage is a seed, or kernel, of the larger house it will grow into effortlessly through the Grow Zones. Thomas Jefferson built Monticello this way, living in one of the little cottages at the back of the house for several years as he built the larger main house. Much of America's traditional architecture is charming precisely because it has grown piece-by-piece over the years. B. The cottage is designed to be extremely energy-efficient. It's small, of course, which saves utility costs, but that's only the beginning of the story. Its windows are tall and aligned across from each other to facilitate great cross-ventilation and daylighting. The exterior walls are 6" thick for insulation purposes. The metal roof reflects close to 90% of the sun's heat in summertime. The porch is designed for outdoor living, not just for looks, because the more time you spend outdoors, the more acclimated you become to the local environment and the less your body craves to be refrigerated in the summer or baked in the winter. C. The beds save energy, too. The house obviously works great in its Kernel condition (no added wings) for a single person or a couple, but how about if you have young kids? Where's the privacy when the children's bunk is sitting in an alcove in the same room with your bed alcove? We solved this problem by attaching heavy draperies to the beams around the alcove that close at night, providing total visual privacy and dampening sound. It will look similar to the old canopy beds, except for the fact that these are part of the architecture, not just a piece of furniture. And they'll have the energy-saving benefit that spawned the canopy beds to begin with: sleeping in a curtained cocoon of a bed allows you to turn the thermostat down to seemingly impossible levels on a winter night and still be toasty in bed. D. The house is designed to be convertible for access by disabled people, and to be visitable by them right off-the-shelf. We added an extra newel on the side of the porch railing that's nearest the door, allowing half of that railing to be omitted and a ramp to be brought up from the rear of the house to the corner of the porch at the door. E. In order to facilitate interior access, the plan is very open, with only two interior doors. They roll into pockets in the wall, allowing them to be narrower than a swinging door, because swinging doors take up part of the opening even when they're wide open. But pocket doors don't usually work very well for a long time. This is because if you're putting one in a standard 4" wall, there's no space for heavy hardware and tracks that will be durable. So we made the wall 6" thick so it could be built much more sturdily. F. But if you're trying to build smaller but smarter cottages, you can't afford to take 6" out of the room. Realizing this, we carved a built-in shelf into the wall over the bed, using the remaining space in the wall. We also carved into the wall between the bath and wardrobe, creating a shelf in the shower and 4" of extra elbow room, making the shower seem much more spacious. Every other interior wall in the cottage was also carved out, creating built-in shelving where other houses have only hollow, useless space. We even carved out the backs of the dining booth for shelving. G. Even the walls themselves are different. No sheetrock is visible at all on the walls. Every bit of it is covered with a wood wainscot below the chair rail and flush board siding above. Sheathing all of the walls in 3/4" of wood allows for shelves, pegs, or other things as heavy as an entire cabinet to be attached to the wall at any point. Once someone has been living in this cottage for a few years, it is likely that there will be very little blank wall space that is not occupied by something useful. You can even attach sturdy chair hooks, allowing chairs to be hung up on the wall when not in use like the Shakers used to do. H. In addition to the energy-saving green features, the cottage is built of green materials that tend to be Clearly, because of these and other features, this house lives much larger than its 523 square feet. It was only after returning to a nondescript Gaithersburg hotel room after dark that I even began work on the exterior design (elevations.) Because the work was so important, I worked through the night, finishing the Vernacular version of the plan by midnight, and the Median version by 4 AM before a frantic race to the airport to catch an early flight. I finished most of the Classical version on the flight and the layover, then wrapped it up that evening in the hotel room. Here are the three elevations. The first is the Classical:  This one is the Median option:  And here's the Vernacular version:  July & August, 2006
Chris Sides and Mike Sherrod have worked with me since the early and mid-1990's, so of course I turned to them to produce the working drawings. Mike spearheaded the production of the USA Weekend Katrina Cottage plans, but Chris checked all of the work. Because we did not know which of the three would win, they created working drawings for each of the designs. We knew that we were going to add wings to bring the total size of the house up to 1,200 - 1,300 square feet, but it was not possible to design the wings until the building site had been determined, so they worked just on the Kernel Cottage at first.
I also turned the designs over to noted artist/architect James Wassell, who rendered them. Eusebio Azcue, whom DPZ has depended on for years to watercolor their beautiful plans and renderings, watercolored James' renderings. Here are the three colored renderings that were posted on the USA Weekend website for voting:    August 27, 2006
Because this was the Sunday closest to the one-year anniversary of Katrina's landfall (August 29, 2005) USA Weekend published the three designs on this date, asking readers to go to their website and vote for their favorite.
September 4, 2006
The poll closed on this date, with convincing results: 45% of voters preferred the Classical version.
September 11, 2006
Way back in April in the Marigny, I had insisted to Ben that part of the story of the Katrina Cottage was its ability to be manufactured, not just site-built by a custom builder. The USA Weekend Katrina Cottage, therefore, should be manufactured because it made a more complete story than having a residential contractor build it... not to mention that the manufacturer would have much more to gain by donating the cottage. In subsequent months, two manufacturers appeared increasingly likely to be the first to produce a certified Katrina Cottage: Cavalier and Housing International. And as the late summer days grew shorter, it appeared that Housing International was going to win the race to have the first Katrina Cottage produced by a housing manufacturer. My intention had always been to offer the USA Weekend Katrina Cottage to the manufacturer that appeared most able to build a real Katrina Cottage. But it isn't easy to re-direct an entire American industry, even when they know the industry redirection, because everything must be re-thought. And I had no intention of offering the USA Weekend cottage prematurely. So I waited a week to see if Housing International would be able to pull off the required revisions to what would become Katrina Cottage VII. On September 11, at approximately 2 PM, just before another frantic dash to the airport, I was able to certify Housing International's Katrina Cottage VII as the first house ever produced by a housing manufacturer to receive the New Urban Guild Seal of Approval.
Here is Katrina Cottage VII, or KC VII, being completed in the factory:  September 12, 2006
The flight from New Orleans got into Miami far too late to call anyone, but early the next morning, I was on the phone to Ben Brown to make sure that he concurred before calling Housing International and offering the manufacturing of the USA Weekend cottage to them.
September 13, 2006
Housing International contacted me to let me know that they would be happy to construct and donate the USA Weekend Katrina Cottage. A few days of discussions of the particulars followed while logistical work was beginning. Manufacturing is different from construction in that there are more steps to think of to get an assembly line set up and running. While prototype units are not built on the assembly line, there is nonetheless more planning involved when building a prototype to prepare for the day when it will be put on the line.
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