A new two-story home with a full apartment upstairs, built on a narrow North Portland lot
- Project type
- New single-family residence + ADU
- ADU
- Upper floor, separate entry, full kitchen and bath
- Structure
- Two-story wood frame, covered porch
- Jurisdiction
- City of Portland
One lot, two households, one permit.
The owners wanted a new home in an established North Portland neighborhood and a way to make the lot work harder: a self-contained apartment upstairs for family, a tenant or future flexibility, without a detached structure eating the yard.
That meant designing a single building that reads as one house from the street but functions as two homes: separate entries, separate kitchens and baths, and sound and fire separation between floors, all inside Portland's zoning and ADU rules.
Character over square footage.
- A house that belongs on a street of 1910s–40s homes: gabled roof, deep covered porch, lap siding, real trim
- A legal upper-floor ADU with its own entry, kitchen and bath
- Personality in the finishes: a custom mosaic entry, hand-painted tile, a wood stove, brass and crystal hardware
- A fixed selections schedule so the custom pieces never held up the build
A kitchen built around a single hand-painted mural.
Painted inset cabinetry, quartz counters, brass plumbing and hardware, and a Delft-style tile mural behind the range that was selected and ordered in preconstruction so the tile setter had it in hand when the backsplash was ready.
A complete second home under the roofline.
Behind its own door at the top of the stair: a living space with checkerboard tile and stained fir trim, a full kitchen with farmhouse sink and induction range, and a bath with penny-tile floor and marble-look subway walls. Separately metered, separately finished, one building envelope.
What it took to get there.
Design & engineering
Architect and structural engineer coordinated; ADU code path and separation details
Site & foundation
Excavation, utilities, stem-wall foundation, crawlspace
Framing & envelope
Two-story frame, porch structure, roofing, windows, lap siding and trim
Mechanical, electrical, plumbing
Two kitchens, two-plus baths, wood stove flue, separate ADU service
Interior finish
Alder floors and stair, painted and stained trim, cabinetry, counters, tile, hardware
Permits, inspections & closeout
City of Portland new-construction and ADU permits; final occupancy
Custom finishes on a production schedule.
A new build with this much custom work fails on lead times, not labor. Every long-lead selection—the tile mural, the mosaic, the range, cabinetry, hardware—was chosen and ordered against the framing schedule, so trades never waited on a box.
The ADU was carried as its own set of lines in the scope table, so the owners could see exactly what the second home added to the cost of the first, and make trade-offs with real numbers.