4 min read

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The DOMA Home Model (DHM) is designed to significantly improve quality of life, especially for middle-income families. The model is an innovative hybrid that combines qualities of a single and a multifamily home. While designed for conventional construction, its spatial plan features an unusual degree of adaptability and flexibility of use, accommodating effortless changes in use and lifestyle, allowing significantly better comfort, affordability, and wellbeing. It is designed to be a greatly improved new middle-income home ownership type of the future.

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Home affordability is one of today’s most burning issues and deeply affects us all. The typical approach to affordable home ownership has been a lifelong process of buying a modest starter home, upgrading, selling, buying again, and renovating or downsizing as income and needs fluctuate. Traditional income-generating home solutions, like double- and triple-deckers, have proved difficult to manage. New affordable home solutions have focused mainly on temporary or partial resolutions, on sacrificing quality, comfort or privacy, reducing size, lowering material and labor costs, overburdening the owners with investment and construction phasing. New multifamily options are often fragmented and unique solutions that are difficult to implement. Practically speaking, the DHM eliminates the lifetime of compromise usually associated with affordable living.

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Working as an architectural designer for over twenty years on some of the Boston area’s most beautiful high-end, award-winning home renovations, it became my passion to bring increased quality of living to middle income families like mine. I have witnessed how even the most comfortably designed homes require modifications over time to accommodate changes of lifestyle. These modifications were costly and disruptive, as well as environmentally wasteful. I realized an outstanding home must be designed differently, to allow and support changes without modifications. Designed to make a difference, the DHM’s flexibility in use allows for a home to suit an owner’s needs over a lifetime. 

At a first glance, the DHM is a conventional four-bedroom, three-bathroom compact home of about 2,000 sq. ft. But by simply opening and closing a few doors and making furniture adjustments, the overall functional layout allows the home to be divided into separate units without any construction modifications. The innovative kitchen design allows it to readily split into two separate kitchens, while the master bedroom’s built-in unit design allows it to be used as a kitchenette, or a workspace as well. These features allow a home to function as three separate units: a 345sf studio, a 588sf one-bedroom and a 824sf two-bedroom. Each of these three units can be used individually or combined in a variety of ways, for up to seven differently sized layouts and living options and over twenty live/work options, depending on zoning and building type. Each layout is designed to feel like a home in itself. The model is suitable for various family structures and for up to eight people. It can be used by a single family, for an extended family, and for rental.

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This versatility of use allows for a homeownership entry at any stage of life- for a single owner, a young expanding family, an older family with children growing up and going off to college, or for empty-nesters. The DHM accommodates rapid, multiple and often precipitous changes we all face- changing spatial needs, working at home, developing and growing a business, as well as managing extended guest and family visits. The model also supports changes in health status and physical abilities. With its universal/ADA design, it can be used and maintained regardless of a person’s age or ability.

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As a long-term solution, sociologically speaking, this home model improves possibilities for anchoring diverse mixed-income communities, connecting and stabilizing city neighborhoods, and strengthening neighborhood and social connections we all need.

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The DHM is designed for a significantly improved financial wellbeing as well. In addition to eliminating the need for a lifetime of costly renovations and moves, wealth-building is enabled by the accommodation of a variety of live/work options, from working at home to developing and running a business, and by availability of areas not needed by the owner to be readily rented out. The model is sized for optimal rental manageability and outstanding monthly affordability for a wide variety of middle-income owners. The homeowners can save and invest the money they gain by spending less than the usual 30% of their income for housing.

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The variety of financial options give owners increased support while weathering the inevitable ups and downs of life, such as unplanned income fluctuations, financially vulnerable times, the need to provide child or elderly care. As such, the DHM is designed to support resiliency, stability, and upward mobility, giving middle-income families a means to own a home and prosper.

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Setting a new standard of efficiency by being able to be used continuously and fully at any given time, either only by the owner or by the extended family, friends, or renters as well, the model allows for maximized use of precious building resources and increased sustainability.  

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The patent pending DHM is available to be scaled in size, modified for a specific building type, and developed for construction.