While living with two children under four years old in a fifth-floor walkup apartment in Boston’s South End, Alan Ricks and Cristina de la Cierva started thinking about a move. When their third baby was born in 2020 during the pandemic, it became a necessity.

Across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the couple found a 1950s bungalow in a neighborhood they loved less than two miles from Harvard Square. In its lifetime, the house had been converted into a duplex and received a third-story addition that Alan—an architect and cofounding principal of Boston-based nonprofit MASS Design Group—deemed “not structurally sound.”

Regardless, they purchased the single-family home that year, and Alan immediately began its gut renovation. In typical fashion for an architect’s home, the project quickly became a testing ground for the principles Alan had been exploring at the studio.

“From a functional standpoint, I wanted to create a space for three little kids to grow up and be able to have access to the outdoors,” the architect says. “From a design and construction standpoint, I wanted to bring the kind of social and environmental agenda that I deploy at MASS to a single-family home.”

That meant pulling the building down to its studs and transforming the previously divided interior into a 4,150-square-foot, sunlight-filled, five-bedroom, four-a-half-bath home, while paying careful attention to its carbon footprint and energy use—both during construction and through the span of its built life.

His first step was to minimize the use of new concrete: The home sits entirely on its existing footprint, aside from a small addition that creates a stepped-down living room with access to the garden. Cutting down the foundation for this level helped mitigate the four-foot-high grade change between the existing first floor and the backyard.

The second step was to build a high-performance envelope. Alan did so by specifying triple-pane windows, non-petrochemical insulation, recycled copper paneling, and siding made from Accoya wood, a cradle-to-cradle material that is both waste-free and chemically harmless. “It was a chance to experiment with materials that had been on our radar at MASS” he explains.

The pitched-roof house appears to be two stories from the street, but it’s actually three with a newly finished basement that holds a guest room. The front half-porch, topped with a green roof, nods to the home’s original construction. Inside that shell, the interiors are light-filled and airy—a happy surprise, since many energy-efficient homes lack large windows to avoid thermal loss.

White oak flooring and millwork throughout add to this feel—and the material is most loved in the kids’ room, says Alan, where an elevated ceiling above the first-floor breakfast nook creates a popped-up stage for imaginative performances and reading sessions. The adults enjoy cooking and entertaining in their open-plan kitchen and living room or grilling in the garden designed by fellow MASS principal Sierra Bainbridge.

The home’s furnishings, many of which are custom and skew Scandinavian in design, were chosen with equal care. Alan engaged woodworkers directly in the Hudson Valley, Brooklyn, Rhode Island, and Boston for bespoke pieces like the 10-seat dining table, crafted in collaboration with Boston maker Saltwoods from a reclaimed barn slab sourced on a family trip to the Berkshires.

The family moved a selection of furniture pieces from Boston to Cambridge—and Alan emphasizes “provenance” as the deciding factor for new purchases. For example, the runner for the staircase (whose placement required new load-bearing steel beams and allowed for more expansive rooms throughout) is by Merida, a company producing environmentally friendly carpets in a bid to revive the weaving industry in Fall River, Massachusetts.

“We value regional wine, Vermont maple syrup, and Carrara marble,” he explains. “But what we’re not asking about is the embedded characteristics of place in these products. There’s this big opportunity to lift narratives that celebrate stories of culture, craft, and sustainable practices.”

Overall, with the help of rooftop solar panels, a heat pump system, and efficient insulation, the house is able to produce more energy than it consumes, and it sends that power back to the city grid. The family also purchased certified offsets to balance the project’s embodied carbon, especially for those materials not sourced locally.

“This house really brings together a holistic set of strategies—that we try to employ across our projects—on a small scale,” says Alan. And the sum of these intentions is, ultimately, a comfortable place to live.

Related Reading:

A Couple Give a Century-Old Craftsman a Passive House Upgrade for $836K

A Striking Black Residence Energizes a Neglected Lot in Melbourne

An Architect’s Slim Home Emphasizes the Outdoors and Aging in Place

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Alan Ricks

Builder: Pre-Con Construction

Landscape: Sierra Bainbridge

Green Roof Design: Recover Green Roofs / @recovergreenroofs

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This Architect’s Cambridge Home Is a Testing Ground for Sustainable Design