A Quiet Office and Guest House in Albany
This beautiful ADU is an office for the homeowners and a comfortable guest house for family.
A Much-Needed Upgrade for an Active Family
The property is owned by a young couple with two children and intense careers that require endless hours on Zoom.
This family has a gorgeous home in a fantastic location, but their main home is small. As many of us know, working from home can be both a blessing and a challenge with little ones around. It’s especially hard if there’s no office or extra bedroom.
Fortunately, the children have amazing grandparents who visit from the Midwest and from Hawaii, spending several months at a time with the family. Unfortunately, these special guests didn’t have a comfortable place to stay while they were in town.
The homeowners loved their home and the visits from family, but they really needed more space to make it work.
So they did the smart thing. Instead of moving to a larger home, they improved the home they already loved by adding an ADU. They had the perfect place for it, too—an old, collapsing detached garage that did nothing but take up space in the yard.
From an Old, Collapsing Garage to a Quiet Office and Guest House
New Avenue handled the design for the ADU, the demolition of the old garage, and the construction of the family’s new accessory dwelling. The project was designed by our senior-most designer, Amy Guiang, who lives in Albany.
Construction was completed in 10 months, even in the face of Covid and major supply chain problems.
With a living area, a kitchenette, a bathroom, space for a large bed, and a relaxing patio, the new unit can be used as a quiet office or a welcoming guest suite for special visitors. The owners say it saved their sanity during Covid lockdowns.
The ADU’s future looks bright, too.
If the owners ever want to rent it out, everything is in place to welcome tenants and a steady rental income. Or they may want to let their kids use it. Sometimes, a client will decide to move into the ADU and move their adult children into the main home.
There are just so many possibilities for a gorgeous accessory dwelling like this one.
New Avenue is on a transformative mission deeply rooted in our cherished values of family togetherness, community, and environmental stewardship. Our unwavering passion is to elevate societal well-being by reimagining suburban living throughout America. We are liberating people from the constraints of outdated housing, igniting a profound shift toward sustainable, dynamic homes that infuse vitality into our neighborhoods. We use our technology, visionary architecture, strategic capital, and cutting-edge building technologies to empower people in every city across the country to transform single-family houses into vibrant living complexes that unite individuals, families, and communities and kindle an enduring love for how we live.
