Architect Magazine Feature: Legacy House

Featured in Architect Magazine, “There is more to the smart-looking but unassuming house completed last summer in Columbus, Ohio’s Linden neighborhood than meets the eye… It is a welcoming, comfortable single-family home; but it is also a life-changing opportunity and the first step in a larger plan for change.

It is the first Legacy House, a new prototype for housing conceived of and designed, built, and donated by local firm Moody Nolan—mortgage free—to a family that had been experiencing homelessness. The firm plans 12 such houses in all—one in each metropolitan region in which it has an office.

The program started three years ago, when the firm totaled up its charitable giving at the end of the fiscal year. “We asked: ‘Can anyone tell us who it helped?’” says cofounder and chairman of the board Curtis Moody, FAIA. When the firm couldn’t answer that question, it decided to use a year’s worth of donations to perform an act of radical architecture: to design a house and give it, for free, to a family in need. “We wanted to do something where we could say: ‘We built that and helped somebody who really needed it,’” he says.”