Cleveland, Ohio, USA
The Ghost House by Cleveland-based Horton Harper Architects is a single-family home constructed on a modest budget, specifically designed for the ever-shrinking middle-class housing market.
There are over 20,000 vacant lots in the City of Cleveland. Many of them have been overlooked for decades.
The project has been awarded a 2023 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Triangular, trapezoidal, and doglegged parcels are squeezed between buildings constructed shortly after the Civil War.
As Cleveland’s near-west side emerged as the city’s nexus of redevelopment and culture in the 1990s, its neighborhoods of steelworker cottages became valued for their old house charm, single-family density, and proximity to downtown.
As a result, these parcels are now being reconsidered by both developers and homeowners alike.
The site is defined by its 22-foot width and 115-foot depth and is constrained by a neighboring house that nearly abuts its southern property line.
The home respects the site’s narrow spatial confines while addressing the built character of its environment.
The house explores the tension between abstraction and the real with a built form situated within and departing from the urban house typology.
From the street, Ghost House reads as a reduced gable roof craftsman form divided and subtracted along its vertical centerline.
Sloping north, the roofline matches the pitch of its neighbors to situate the house within its environment.
But this halved profile subverts the American vernacular type generating a striking asymmetry that addresses the site’s narrow constraints.
This profile is extruded down its narrow lot, clad in blackened, vertical cypress on its east and west faces and black, corrugated metal on the north and south.
Passersby confronts a building that is paradoxically of its environment but denies a simple typological reading.
The interior is organized around a stacked linear staircase. Glass panels veil the staircase from the ground floor, creating an ethereal interplay of light, shadow, and reflection.
Illuminated by clerestory windows at the roof level, the stair terminates at a hallway that circles towards the private spaces of the second floor.
In a quiet homage to the neighborhood, the bedroom ceilings are symmetrically vaulted into a subtracted gable form.
The basement is home to a secondary living space, bathroom, and storage room.
White surfaces are contrasted with black detailing to allow the home’s geometry to speak for itself, while white oak floors and modest pieces of furniture infuse the interior with midwestern warmth.
Ghost House demands contemplation without alienating itself from its environment, proving that rigorous domestic architecture can emerge on peculiar lots within Cleveland and throughout the country.
Project: Ghost House
Architects: Horton Harper Architects
Design Team: Michael Horton, Westleigh Harper, Kerry Sandoval
General Contractor: Ghost Construction, Ltd.
Client: Private
Photographers: Horton Harper Architects, Christian Phillips, and Peter Larson