Backyard Passive Pod

Cold Spring, NY

Workspace is at a premium in a tightly clustered, historic community. For young parents with a growing family, an efficient workspace for working from home is essential. River Architects was petitioned to design a studio for a local printmaker, to allow her to focus on drawing and production work while keeping the noise and activity from distracting her spouse’s in-house Zoom meetings. Like all well-designed small spaces that need to be multifunctional, the structure’s porch—created from locally milled locust timbers—does double duty, serving as outdoor seating on the postage stamp-sized lot, allowing for entertaining and backyard relaxing.

River Architects designed this pod as a prototype for other accessory dwelling units (ADUs), testing ideas such as prefabrication and panelization, low-impact foundations with the use of helical piles, and new-to-the-US compact heat-pump technology, which meets the unique conditioning needs of a small, energy efficient building design. It is being used as a case study for other ADUs within the community.

Photos by Pamela Cook