Architects Tiffany Bowie and Joe Malboeuf’s Capitol Hill, Seattle, infill project was completed for $189 per square foot. Its street-facing facade is clad in prefinished siding from Taylor Metals, and cedar shaped and cut with CNC technology. The couple was inspired by the porthole windows of the Maritime Hotel in New York City, one of their favorite buildings.

Malboeuf stands at a Fisher & Paykel refrigerator in the kitchen. He and Bowie shopped around to find appliances that balance cost and performance: the dishwasher is Bosch, the gas cooktop is Dacor, and the oven is Fagor. Walnut veneer clads the cabinets, and the floors are bamboo.

The three units are situated vertically within the structure, each occupying a portion of each floor. All share similar floor plans to Bowie and Malboeuf’s residence: flexible space on the first floor, the main living area and kitchen on the second floor, and bedrooms on the third floor. The garage is located beneath the building.

Bowie and Malboeuf’s unit occupies three levels facing the property’s backyard. The living-dining room has a mix of vintage pieces—a Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer and an LC4 chaise by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand—alongside furniture from CB2.

Duravit’s D-Code fixtures outfit the bathroom.

Bowie designed the nightstand, which acts as a prime perch for a vintage lamp her parents purchased in the Netherlands. The wall paint throughout the unit is Eider White by Sherwin-Williams.

Pricier materials, like the locally sourced cedar used for the garage doors, are applied judiciously.

Prefinished cement fiberboard panels cover the rear facade.

The architects installed concrete pavers on the north and east sides of the house with wooly thyme planted in between.

The third-floor master bedroom boasts sweeping views of Seattle.

Rex folding rocker chairs from Design Within Reach are paired with black galvanized-steel planters from Ikea on the building’s roof deck.

In the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, architect Barbara Bestor designed Blackbirds, a multi-family housing development with 18 detached and semi-detached homes ranging from 1,400 to 1,900 square feet each. Bestor says she approached the project with a strategy towards "stealth density," attuned to the scale and context of the neighborhood. "I have a romantic idea about individuals densifying L.A. as opposed to large developers doing twnety blocks at a time," she says. Spacious interiors open up to expansive views of the hills beyond.

In North Philadelphia, the Belfield Avenue Townhomes were built to Passive House standards, making the project much more energy-efficient than a conventional building. It is one of several multifamily structures that are being built in cities across the country for moderate-income families.

Knickerbocker Commons is one of two 24-unit buildings that architect Chris Benedict has designed to Passive House standards in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Along with the Mennonite, which was built just a mile and a half away, it is open to disabled and low-income tenants, who will pay $600 to $1,110 per month. Putting foam and stucco on the facade proved an economical way to insulate the structure.

Anchoring a multi-family property in Chula Vista is a 1,200-square-foot garage that Ramiro Losada-Amor of Modern Granny Flat transformed into an ADU for Jorge Cuevas Antillón and Ruben Martínez. The garage door is from Coastal Garage Doors.

For a modern multifamily structure in San Francisco, landscape designer Christopher Radcool Reynolds used palms to create privacy and shade. “The trunks are architectural, like columns, and the fronds offer a lot of movement, which balances the building’s rigidity,” he says.

A living wall planted with succulents creates a “view” where there was none.

The Archer Park Apartments is one of Determined By Design's many multi-family projects; founder Kia Weatherspoon seeks not only to create well-designed spaces for her clients, but also to advocate for them through her work, getting to the heart of what they most deeply need.

Based in Portland, Oregon, MODSpdx is a West Coast builder with a holistic approach to customized and site-specific modular multi-family and commercial buildings. Buildings are constructed in their Portland factory, with a focus on proper ventilation and thermodynamics for the finished product through tight factory controls and an analysis of repeatable processes. Because the company works with a range of general contractors, architects, construction companies, and residential developers, their finished homes vary in aesthetics from traditional to contemporary.

The Forj Lofts is a Minimalistic/ Scandinavian design. Residing on the Atlantic coast of Delaware, the project is engineered for extreme wind loads. The Forj name is a play on words for an Iron Forge, as there is nothing but steel used for the building components. Limited staging areas for material and crew mandated a carefully executed shipment and assembly program. These steel metal homes are just one example of how steel can be used in multi-family construction.

Tucked behind a suburban home is the unique multi-family project.

Zip Kit Homes spent over a decade building a lot of different homes—over 500 homes and multi-family projects. After experimenting with all different types of building construction: standard site-built homes, panelized homes, modular homes, etc., they recently launched kit homes to offer precision-built, sustainable small homes shipped anywhere in North America. They also offer many site-built floor plans that are both energy efficient and efficient to build.

A multi-family complex, Saint Thomas/Ninth, brings contemporary form to the historic Irish Channel neighborhood.

979 Del Mar - Multi-family project in Pasadena CA

In Milpitas, California, Villa Homes designed a multifamily project with two 800-square-foot ADUs, which cost $678,000 total to build.

A Wassily Chair and an LC4 sit amongst furniture from CB2 in this multi-family home.

Traditional 4 Unit Multi-Family Residence. Hiram J. Hamer, AIA. 1940

This multi-family structure in Berlin, designed by Deimel Oelschläger Architekten, is a finalist in the apartment buildings category.

Weatherspoon's experience in hospitality and residential spaces translates to her current work, where she completes projects for multi-family residences.

Each of the Belfield Avenue residences is outfitted with carbonized bamboo floors and Bosch appliances, including an induction cooktop. Onion Flats designed the medium-density fiberboard screen, whose round perforations serve as a filter for sunlight and a playful surface for children.

The Melody, named after a homeless woman who died in 2022, is Atlanta's first multifamily shipping container development, a model for reducing homelessness.

The containers are subtle enough to blend in with a front garden. They are also modular, so multifamily residences can combine multiple containers to form a larger unit.

The multi-family townhouse is situated just a block away from Malcolm X Blvd, offering quick access to some of Bed-Stuy's most coveted restaurants, including Chez Oskar and Nana Ramen.

Since the completion of Parris Terraces in 2019, the Bayside neighborhood has continued to see growth and development—with additional multifamily buildings popping up, as well as new bars, restaurants, gyms, and offices opening their doors.

Anchoring a multi-family property in Chula Vista is a 1,200-square-foot garage that Ramiro Losada-Amor of Modern Granny Flat transformed into an ADU for Jorge Cuevas Antillón and Ruben Martínez.

While not a single-family prefabricated home, this multi-family residence in Nashville, Tennessee by EOA Architects employed prefabricated construction in which modular units were fabricated by Champion Builders in two factories in Pennsylvania and then shipped to the site for construction.