This story was originally published in Dwell’s November 2010 issue.

When architect Mitchell Snyder launched his eponymous firm in 2009, his goal was to take more creative liberties and ownership of his projects. Little did he expect, however, that his first clients would be a demanding set of chickens.

In 2007, Snyder and his girlfriend, Shelley Martin, moved from Brooklyn to a 1924 Craftsman bungalow in Portland, Oregon. “We were so excited  to have a yard and a garden,” Snyder recalls. Martin, who is an architectural designer, put her green thumb to work, and in little time they had lettuce, radishes, snap peas, onions, carrots, potatoes, and other produce poking up through the soil. Then, a good friend and fellow New York transplant opened an organic farm supply store in town. “She got us excited about having chickens as an extension of our garden,” Snyder says. Soon, he was drafting plans in Google SketchUp for a backyard chicken coop.

Hens as clients, Snyder learned, are not too different from humans. “They have the same considerations of comfort and protection from the elements,” he says. “Each one has a certain square-footage requirement. The coop has to keep them warm in the winter and cool in the summer. There needs to be ventilation.” Then, there were the legal and ethical obligations: Portland permits each household up to three hens (no roosters), and chicken-raising guides recommend that each chicken be given two square feet in the coop and four square feet in the run.

Snyder’s resulting design is an insulated four-foot cube framed with two-by-fours, sheathed with oriented strand board (OSB), finished with reclaimed cedar siding, ventilated with two upper windows, and topped with a bed of native Oregon sedum plants. “The living roof helps keep the coop cool, but mostly it was a chance to experiment and design something fun,” he says. The only thing Snyder would change, in retrospect, is the human access: “We have to crouch down a little to go through the run and into the coop to clean it.”

But the hens—a Bantam Frizzle named Da’ Frizzle Fo’ Shizzle, a Barred Plymouth Rock named Barred Rock Obama, and a yet-unnamed rescue from a neighbor—seem happy. They’re healthy and keep busy with their duties, namely “eating and digging around for food, which they take very seriously,” Snyder says. And in return, the chickens have bestowed their thanks: nearly an egg per hen per day. Fortunately for Snyder and Martin, they have plenty of friends happy to share a scramble.

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For His First Solo Project, an Architect Builds a Backyard Chicken Coop With a Living Roof