This house was built for three generations

Nathan Blanding chronicled the construction of his Clark Avenue home on a blog he called “Mr. Blanding’s Dream House.”

The title was inspired by “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” a 1948 film starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.

For Nathan Blanding, it really was his dream house: it was an infill project, multigenerational, handicapped-accessible and high-energy-performance. And he built it himself.

“This was quite a pleasure to get all the criteria in one house,” he said.

Everything on his list of criteria might look familiar except “multigenerational.” That simply means it was designed and built specifically to shelter Nathan and his wife and children as well as Nathan’s parents, in a house classified as a single-family house that is actually two attached residences.

Nathan, an architect who now owns a design-build company, said he didn’t have many helpful examples to guide him. But there were plenty of cautionary tales about parents moving in with their children for economic or health reasons, or grandchildren moving in with their grandparents. These situations might involve a spare bedroom or a basement, the plans all makeshift and improvisational.

He and his family had the advantage of architectural forethought. It helped that no one was afraid to talk about difficult subjects, Nathan said. He and his wife, Kristen, talked with his parents, Terese and Keith, about a shared house where his parents could live even after they lost mobility, and where eventually they could die.

That’s why his parents’ half of the house (actually a third of the total space) has a downstairs guest room that could become their bedroom when they are no longer able to use the stairs. There is a zero-entry shower and the doors are wide enough to provide easy wheelchair access. His mother’s upstairs art studio is plumbed, meaning it could be converted fairly easily to a bathroom if his parents ever needed a live-in caregiver.

Nathan also designed the 2,800-square-foot house, relatively small by modern standards, to ensure “there’s enough room for everyone to have their own space.” His father has a “man cave” study in the ground-floor guest room, tucked under the stairs. Kristen, an oil and gas consultant, has an office just off the front door, where she can have the privacy to conduct her business from home.

And there is plenty of space for being together. There are frequent visits from residence to residence, particularly on the part of Nathan and Kristen’s two daughters, Jocelyn, 6, and Ella, 1½ .

“The girls spend a lot of time up there,” Nathan said, referring to his parents’ living space. “Whenever they get tired of playing with each other, they can find a parent or a grandparent to curl up on the couch with.”

There is a large rooftop patio between the two residences, a small deck for Keith and Terese and another, larger ground-floor patio for the whole family.

“We decided to make all our communal spaces that are big be the outside spaces,” Nathan said.

Nathan and Kristen used to live right across the street from their new house. He was working for A&E Architects at the time, and his parents were already living in Billings.

“We pulled the grandkid card and convinced them to move to Billings,” Nathan said.

Or, as his mother put it, “We were living in Oregon and we were accused of being derelict grandparents.”

Nathan and his parents had been talking for years about living together someday. Twenty years ago, Nathan helped his father build a house between Augusta and Choteau. It was big enough to include a bed-and-breakfast that his parents then ran, and father and son hoped to work on another such project someday.

They knew they wanted to build in Billings, but they weren’t sure where. Nathan and Kristen loved their neighborhood, on the 500 block of Clark, and they started thinking about the lot across the street, which had two run-down rental houses on it.

“We just realized this was the perfect spot,” Nathan said.

It took a year for all of them to figure out the financial arrangements and logistics of living together. Nathan left A&E Architects in the spring of 2011 and devoted the next two years to the project. His father suffered a small stroke and had a general loss of muscle tone, which prevented him from working on the house as much as they planned.

“We had a pretty big role reversal,” Nathan said.

Nathan took a part-time job designing and building sets for the Nova Center for the Performing Arts, and it took two years to build the two-family house, which also involved demolishing the two rental units.

The two-story stucco house has R-80 roof insulation and R-50 in the walls, both far beyond what is required by code. The house is heated and cooled by a heat recovery ventilator, made for use in tight, highly insulated houses. It brings in fresh air and vents stale indoor air, and in winter months it transfers heat from outgoing air to the fresh air coming in. It operates on the same principle in the summer, except that the incoming air is cooled with the air being vented.

The result, Nathan said, is that a gas furnace is their only source of heat, and most of the time it is not needed. In such a tight house, there are noticeable heat gains from appliances, a plasma TV, computers and such. The gas bill averages $25 a month, he said.

Nathan followed passive-house standards, from the German passivhaus movement, the goal of which is ultra-low energy use.

“The fact that we can produce houses that produce more energy than they use and we don’t—that’s pretty irritating,” Nathan said.

That’s why he started North-South Building, a design-build company that will give him the chance to build such houses for other clients. Doing the building, too, rather than just drawing plans for a house, “is just a much broader, deeper experience,” he said.

Nathan said his ideal clients will probably be a retired couple looking to build a “high-performance small house,” or to remodel an existing house close to the downtown.

At the moment he is designing a house for Pam and Bob Ellis. Pam Ellis said she and her husband “were really enamored” with Nathan’s Clark Avenue home. “It’s beautifully done, beautiful finishes,” she said, “but without the huge wasted space you see in so many traditionally designed homes.”

She said they also like his practical approach, his thoughtful consideration for how a house will be used, and to how future repairs can be made, “to what is attractive but also cost-efficient.”

“That’s the stuff you don’t typically get from a builder,” she said—“using every inch in a creative way that’s also practical.”

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