Legacy House

This article appeared in the August 2020 issue of ARCHITECT.

There is more to the smart-looking but unassuming house completed last summer in Columbus, Ohio’s Linden neighborhood than meets the eye. With its warm-toned siding, canted roof, and neat walkways, it is a welcoming, comfortable single-family home; but it is also a life-changing opportunity and the first step in a larger plan for change.

It is the first Legacy House, a new prototype for housing conceived of and designed, built, and donated by local firm Moody Nolan—mortgage free—to a family that had been experiencing homelessness. The firm plans 12 such houses in all—one in each metropolitan region in which it has an office.

The program started three years ago, when the firm totaled up its charitable giving at the end of the fiscal year. “We asked: ‘Can anyone tell us who it helped?’” says cofounder and chairman of the board Curtis Moody, FAIA. When the firm couldn’t answer that question, it decided to use a year’s worth of donations to perform an act of radical architecture: to design a house and give it, for free, to a family in need. “We wanted to do something where we could say: ‘We built that and helped somebody who really needed it,’” he says.

The firm partnered with Southeast Healthcare and the YMCA of Central Ohio to help identify a family. “We learned that the majority of people in shelters in Columbus are single mothers with kids, so [the house] needed to respond to that,” says CEO Jonathan Moody, AIA. “A lot of challenges around homelessness are down to one missed paycheck or rent—with a little help, they would be able to get back on their feet.”

The three-bedroom, two-bath Columbus Legacy House sits on a lot donated by the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and is sized to meet the needs of a family, yet remain affordable for them to maintain, in scale, materials, and systems. It was also designed to appeal to a mass market. “We wanted to design this in a way that any of our own young professionals would be happy to live there—we weren’t trying to design something that looked like it was for a person that is in need,” Curtis Moody says.

Moody Nolan reached out to local partners who donated everything from building materials to construction services, but it was also a firm-wide effort: “We didn’t push the staff to do something, but on their own, they took up the mantle,” Curtis Moody says. They volunteered time on site, offering to paint the walls, and, unbeknownst to the Moodys, even raised and individually donated money to furnish the childrens’ rooms and stock them with toys and clothes, and furnish other areas.

When the keys were handed over, the house became the property of its new family—without a mortgage and without any strings: When the owner chooses, they can sell it to finance their next move, providing security and opportunity.

Access to affordable housing is a critical issue, not just from the perspective of scarcity, but also because, Curtis Moody says, “if you’re in a shelter, you have no ability to borrow funds. Even if you have a job, you can’t come up with the equity, so at some level, those people can’t afford what is considered affordable housing. We felt we could address that one by one. We’re going to give them this house and that is the equity for them to take the next step.”

The firm likens the Legacy House program’s effect to “a drop in the ocean that can begin to create waves,” Jonathan Moody says. “This started as a conversation of one house, in one neighborhood, or even 12 houses in 12 neighborhoods, but the hope is that a lot of people right now are asking: ‘What can they do? What can they contribute?’ Everyone should be entered in the conversation about how to make an impact, to criticize yourself, and to measure yourself to constantly improve.”

The second Legacy House is set to break ground in Nashville in September, and despite a delay for COVID-19, the firm is on schedule to complete 12 houses in 12 years. And it hopes to serve as an inspiration to others: “We’re pushing this as something that other architectural firms might want to do—either individually or as a group of firms that come together to design and build a house and gift it to some needy family,” Curt Moody says. “There’s an ebb and flow to architectural businesses—there’s years where firms are doing really great, and they can use those resources for things other than profits for partners.” To make lasting change in your community, he says, follow a simple formula: “Do what you can, when you can, with what you’ve got, while you’ve got it.”

Project Credits
Project: Columbus Legacy House, Columbus, Ohio
Client/Owner: Confidential
Architect: Moody Nolan, Columbus . Jay Boone, AIA (partner-in-charge); Kyle Glass, AIA (project architect)
Interior Designer: Moody Nolan, Columbus . Eileen Goodman (partner-in-charge of interior design)
Sustainability Designer: Allen Schaffer, AIA
ME Engineer: Dynamix Engineering
Structural Engineer: Jezerinac Geers & Associates
Civil Engineer: Moody Engineering
Construction Manager: Paul Pryor, AIA (construction administration)
General Contractor: Simco Construction
Landscape Architect: Edge
Lighting Designer: Moody Nolan in collaboration with Dynamix Engineering
Size: 815 gross square feet
Cost: Withheld