JAMAICA PLAIN RESIDENCE
Boston, Massachusetts

This new cottage addition creates an accessible unit so a young woman with cerebral palsy could live independently within her sister's household. A corner lot, facing the Southwest Corridor Park, was obtained from the city and added to two 19th-century dwellings housing three condominium units. These structures were originally built by a returning Civil War union officer. One served as his house, and the other was a barracks for his former soldiers, who worked as a building crew on many of the finer houses on Sumner Hill in Jamaica Plain.

The cottage is canted to the view of the park and connected to the main house with a one-story glazed entry porch and sunroom. Above, a roof deck for the second-floor unit overlooks the garden and park beyond. The asymmetric roofline of the cottage with inset dormer preserves the view for the second floor.

A new shared garden and parking area are provided. Gingko trees along the street tie in to the adjacent parkland, creating a view of continuous open space from the corner windows.

The accessible bathroom is designed to celebrate the young woman's love of J.P. Licks ice cream. J.P. Licks donated the labor of their tiler to create the broken black and white mosaic cow pattern on the curving countertop. The rubber floor is grass green, the walls are painted a cow-patterned gray and white, while the ceiling is sky blue.

The family has moved. The new owners are two architects and their young children, who have reinterpreted the house in their own complementary way.