The Stanley Townhouses is a four unit multi-family housing project located just outside the Glendale Central Business District, in a neighborhood populated with large apartment buildings. The project is designed to be a response to the big box housing model that dominates Southern California and is driven by maximizing interior square footage at the expense of the quality at the interior and exterior spaces. The project seeks to be a response to the conflict between the socioeconomic demands for increased square footage and density, and a response to the community demands that the massing of the new higher density projects not overwhelm existing neighborhoods. The Stanley Townhouses diminishes the lines between single family and multifamily buildings, and between one unit and another to create a compositionally simple building appropriate to the scale of our residential neighborhoods.
The project, which is two floors atop one level of subterranean parking, starts with a standard two and three bedroom townhouse floor plan. Shared spaces within each unit is located at the lower level while the intimate, more private spaces are located at the upper level. In rethinking the standard townhouse typology, every other unit is shifted from the plane of the adjacent units. In addition to breaking up the rowhouse mass, the shifted units create private gardens and alternating entries for each unit. With a quality outdoor space added to each home at the lower level, upper levels of the two corner units shift again to align with the adjacent units. This introduces a covered entryway to each of the corner units and an interlocking motif that obscures the vertical legibility of each unit. Additionally, the second floor shift also creates large second floor balconies and a roof garden for the corner units, and a unique yet unified aesthetic to the individual units.
