Houses for actors in a Connecticut River village

Modular-adaptable designs are seen as a possible solution to Northeastern housing needs. How do you fit short-term housing for some 60 musical theater people into a 19th-century Connecticut village, the kind of place that tenaciously resists change? That was the question posed to architect and planner Patrick Pinnell by Goodspeed Musicals, an organization that for 46 years has been putting on shows in an 1876 building that overlooks the Connecticut River. The theater, a major regional attraction, brings more than 100,000 visitors a year to the village of East Haddam. Existing lodging for actors, directors, designers, and technical staff was cramped and out of date. Pinnell came up with the idea of providing what was needed — 65 bedrooms plus private baths and mostly shared kitchens and living areas — by constructing 17 shared houses, all within walking distance of the theater, known as Goodspeed Opera House. Construction is expected to begin this month. Maier Design Group and David Arai were production architects and prepared the renderings. Descendents of Katrina The structures Pinnell designed are 2.5-story gabled dwellings with ample front porches; they stem from his knowledge of the massing, size, and style of old houses in East Haddam, a picturesque semi-rural town between Hartford and Long Island Sound. “They are also conceptually descendents of the Katrina Cottage,” says Pinnell, who participated in the 2005 Mississippi Renewal Forum for 11 Gulf Coast communities damaged by Hurricane Katrina. “The core unit in the first version [for Goodspeed] was a 14-by-40-foot module designed to be factory-produced and stacked,” Pinnell says. That module seemed a good one to use in communities devastated by Katrina — it held the promise of housing large numbers of displaced families economically and quickly. The Katrina model proved somewhat offputting, however, to people in East Haddam. “There was a sense among the neighbors and Goodspeeders that this was too small,” Pinnell says of the 14-foot-wide module. So he kept at it and came up with houses mostly based on the original module, but wider; the majority will be 28 feet wide. Six of the houses will be arranged to face a crescent-shaped green that Pinnell has planned. “The crescent is a kind of homage to 19th-century campgrounds, Methodist in their origins, like Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard,” he explains. The green will be carved in part from an expanse of surface parking. Each end of the curving row will be anchored by a surviving 19th-century house, helping the new construction mesh with the long-settled surroundings. Other new houses will be built not far away. Ornamentation will vary from house to house, and there will be differences in finish “to make sure this doesn’t look like 19th-century millworker-Monopoly Board houses,” Pinnell points out. The aim is to make the houses fairly simple but not pinched. The initial thought was that modular construction would be needed to keep costs down. Excluding foundations, some bids, using modular construction, indicated a cost of $80 to $85 a square foot. The cost now appears likely to be lower than originally expected. The houses will probably end up using a combination of conventional or panelized construction, says Dan McMahon, Goodspeed’s marketing director. Goodspeed, under Executive Director Michael Price, has collaborated on the $5 million project with the Town of East Haddam, aided by a $2.5 million state grant. When the houses are ready for occupancy, the theater can sell nine older residential properties that Goodspeed owns. Those will then become part of an overall plan by the town to entice more shops and restaurants into the vicinity of the theater, making the village more self-sufficient for people on foot. Pinnell sees the Goodspeed housing as “a test case for inserting fairly dense new housing into historic fabric.” New England, he notes, “has provided many of the models for New Urbanism but has built almost none of it.” The model in East Haddam could show how to create affordable housing that “adds interest and value” to old settings. “I would love to sneak a bunch of these into newly inserted alleys in places like Fairfield County [an especially high-priced part of Connecticut] and Westchester [New York],” Pinnell says. “If the prices come in as hoped, it’s going to be a pretty interesting kind of product.”