I started Whitfield + Associates after thirteen years inside a large firm where every project went out the door with a stair to the front door. By forty I had watched too many of my parents' friends sell their homes because they couldn't manage the steps. Whitfield + Associates exists to draw houses that the owner will not be forced to leave when their knees are seventy. Everything follows from that single decision.
We are deliberately small — two of us, sometimes three — because aging-in-place work is owner-led, and the owner needs to talk to the architect. Our first meeting always happens in the client's current home. We measure the rooms they actually use, the rooms they have stopped using, the threshold at the front door, the step into the shower. The plan we draw afterwards is calibrated to the body of the person who will live in it, not to a generic three-bedroom programme.
Concretely: every house we draw has a level approach from the public sidewalk to the front door, a 36-inch clear path through every interior doorway, a primary bedroom and full bathroom on the entry level, a zero-threshold shower with blocking already in the wall for grab bars, and a kitchen counter that an individual seated in a chair can use for cooking. We have learned that none of these moves make a house feel medical. They make a house feel calm.
“I draw houses that the owner will not be forced to leave when their knees are seventy.”
Martindale-Brightwood is where most of our work happens. The neighbourhood's historic front-porch typology gives us, almost for free, the front-porch-and-broad-eave language that an accessible house needs anyway. We are proud to have built five houses on the same block over the last eight years — and prouder still that none of the original owners have had to move out.
I want to say one more thing about the work, because it bears saying out loud. An aging-in-place house should not look like the medical-equipment catalogue. The shower I draw has blocking in the wall for grab bars, but no grab bars yet. The doorways are 36 inches wide, but they don't have the institutional lever-handle hardware. The countertop has a knee-space we can open in a weekend if it's ever needed. The accessibility is in the bones. The visible house is just a house — porch, front door, the same Indiana porch swing the family had on the previous home. The dignity of the owner is the brief, and the drawing is the technical mechanism by which we honour it.