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Alexandria, VA There's a neighborhood near you — maybe it's where you grew up, maybe it's where you go on weekends, maybe it's just a place you drive through sometimes and feel something shift — where everything just works. The buildings come up to the sidewalk. There's a coffee shop on the corner. Trees line the street. People are actually outside, walking somewhere, stopping to talk. The buildings are four or five stories, maybe six — old brick or stone, windows that open,

Not a single building type but a design approach. Not a density target but a set of principles. Applied consistently, across different conditions, it produces neighborhoods that feel like neighborhoods rather than developments.

One hundred years ago this fall, the Supreme Court decided Euclid v. Ambler Realty and handed American cities the legal machinery to separate everything from everything else. Homes here, shops there, schools over there, workplaces over here — and you had to drive between all of them. I bring up the anniversary because it frames the moment we're in. The regulatory order Euclid set in motion took decades to assemble. It's now being reformed in a meaningful way — and single-stai

The best projects don't always start with a blank slate. Sometimes they start with a problem: a 1920s landmark hotel that needed saving, and a site that could hold new homes if they were designed with enough care not to overwhelm what made the place worth coming to. That was the brief for the Cavalier Residences — and where our work with the cottage court began.

The cottage court is one of the most powerful housing ideas America ever produced — and then forgot about for seventy years. Not an apartment complex, not a subdivision: small individual homes arranged around a shared garden, each with its own front door, its own porch, its own sense of home. In this first article in our missing middle series, we look at why the cottage court disappeared, why it's coming back, and what makes it work when it's done right.