Bauer Studio designs houses for households that are larger and more intergenerational than the standard American three-bed two-bath assumes. My own family arrived in Indianapolis as four households sharing two houses across one alley, and we lived that way for fourteen years. The architectural profession has, with a few honourable exceptions, drawn for a single nuclear unit per address for the last sixty years. That's a cultural decision, not an architectural one, and we are trying to unmake it.
Our houses are organised around the rooms a multigenerational family actually shares — the kitchen, the front porch, the side yard between the primary house and the cottage out back. We design pairs: a primary single-family with an ADU behind it, or a cottage court of three to four small dwellings around a shared yard. The bedrooms are private. The cooking and the eating and the looking-after-children happens in spaces that are shared on purpose.
We are a small studio — three of us — and our work is slow, because the design conversation with a multigenerational client takes longer than with a single-buyer client. We meet with the grandparents, the parents, the cousins, the in-laws. We draw options that include a small mother-in-law suite on the entry level of the primary house, a fully separate ADU behind it, or both. We ask, repeatedly, where the family will gather for Sunday lunch in twenty years. The plan we settle on has to make that lunch possible.
“We design pairs. The bedrooms are private; the cooking, the eating, the looking-after-children, that's shared on purpose.”
We refuse the language of 'in-law suite' as a small embarrassed afterthought. Many of our houses are designed with the primary and secondary residences as equals — two front doors, two addresses, one household. The cottage court typology is the missing piece of the Indianapolis fabric, and we are deliberately drawing it back into existence, one site at a time.
I should also say what we are not. We are not the studio for a developer assembling a portfolio of identical units; the brief we want is the one that names the family. We are not the studio to draw a single-bedroom investor flip; the brief we want is one where the kitchen is sized to actual saucepans the cook already owns. The cultural specificity of the work is the work. Our best houses are the ones a visiting grandparent recognises, on the first day, as a house their family could keep on living in for two more generations. That recognition — when it happens, at the front door, in the first ten seconds — is the entire point of the practice.