The Design of DC’s Tiny Homes on The Wharf

• June 21, 2013

by Shilpi Paul

Rendering of a micro-unit at The Wharf. Courtesy of PN Hoffman.

As the micro-unit trend sweeps through urban areas, one DC developer has begun finalizing the design of a few tiny homes that will be coming to the city in 2017.

Around 150 of the 875 residential units at the massive waterfront project The Wharf will be extremely small studios. Though they aren’t quite as teeny as NYC’s 275-square-foot apartments, they will be tighter than your average home, at between 330 and 380 square feet. Because of the limited square footage, the developers Hoffman-Madison Waterfront and architects Perkins Eastman-DC are working to create design elements that make the space comfortable and useful.

“We’ve been thinking about every square inch and making it as flexible and user-friendly as possible,” Hoffman-Madison Waterfront’s Matt Steenhoek told UrbanTurf.

Some of the features reminded us of Graham Hill’s “LifeEdited“ apartment, which manages to fit 8 rooms into a 420-square-foot space by creating multi-purpose spaces, built-ins and moving walls. At The Wharf, built-ins will fill up one entire wall, from the doorway to the window. Shelves for books, an armoire for clothing, a sleek kitchen and a Murphy bed that turns into a couch and shelf at night allow residents to make better use of the available floor space.

Steenhoek assures us that the Murphy bed will be “sleek and modern,” and that the refrigerator will be smaller than one you might find in a rowhouse or two-bedroom condo. “You’re not shopping for a family of four, so you don’t need a massive fridge,” he noted. Rather than swinging doors, the Wharf units will have a sliding barn door. The bathroom will have natural light coming through a translucent glass wall near the shower.

In addition to built-ins, the designers made sure that each unit has some sort of interaction with the outdoors and the waterfront views. Some units will have floor-to-ceiling windows, with bays looking out into Virginia, while others will have double glass doors that open to a juliet balcony.

The Wharf is estimated to break ground at some point this year, but these miniscule units won’t be available until 2017.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/micro-units_at_the_wharf_will_have_built-ins_and_multi-purpose_areas/7229