Usonia House

About the Studio

Design + Build · Custom Residential Architecture

WHO WE ARE

USONIA HOUSE is an architectural design studio focused on custom residential work: houses, cabins, ADUs, small offices, exterior accessory buildings, and furniture. Architectural design services are the heart of the studio. We're a little obsessed with building technology, and the techniques we design around cost less to build and perform better for decades.

Every commission is drawn for you and with you, from the first concept sketch through bidding and permits. And when you want one point of contact for the whole project, we can act as your general contractor and carry the design through construction.

Our built work, from offices to garden buildings to furniture, stands within a short drive of the drawing board it came from. Every drawing in this catalog is original Usonia House work.

Dylan Groshek, Usonia House.
Dylan Groshek, Usonia House.
HOW WE WORK

The short version is below. The full process, Dream, Design, Document, lives on Working With Us.

1. Inquire

Call or write about your project: the land, the budget, the rooms you need. The first conversation is free, and a modest design retainer starts the work.

2. Design

We model everything in full 3D and show you real alternatives. Plans, renderings, and costs together, before construction documents begin.

3. Build

A complete, buildable drawing set goes out to bid. If you'd like, we act as your general contractor and stay with the project through the last nail.

THE NEW ZEITGEIST · WHY USONIA HOUSE EXISTS

ARCHITECTURE is due for its next era, and we intend to help build it. Designers are stewards of the future environment: the world we draw today is the one everyone lives in tomorrow. For too long, buildings have been drawn as monuments to money, inhuman in scale and indifferent to the people inside them and the nature around them. Usonia House is the alternative.

The new zeitgeist is architecture that cares. Human-scaled places designed from a real understanding of how people live, age, and heal. Environments rich and complex enough to keep minds engaged, and rooted deeply enough in nature that being inside them feels like belonging to the land. Obtainable, always, because an environment only works when everyone can afford to live well in it.

That is the whole mission: serve our fellow humans while living complementary with nature, through the environments we create. Read the founding essay in full: The New Zeitgeist (PDF), written by Dylan Groshek.

RURAL OBSERVANCES · PAINTINGS FROM THE STUDIO
The farmstead.
The farmstead.
The hamlet, from above.
The hamlet, from above.
The pottery shop.
The pottery shop.

These digital paintings are our raw distillation of rural architecture: buildings reduced to what they truly are, a mass on a landscape. Every Usonia House design begins from that truth, and every drawing works to deserve its place on the land.

WHAT WE DESIGN

Better Building, For Less

We design around modern construction science: disciplined framing layouts that eliminate waste, envelope details that out-insulate a conventional wall, and drawing sets complete enough that builders bid them tight. Better performance at a lower in-place cost. That's the whole idea.

From the drawing board. A Usonia House schematic design study.
From the drawing board. A Usonia House schematic design study.
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