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Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Designed by Cleveland-based firm Horton Harper Architects, the Haunted House is a budget-friendly single-family home designed for the shrinking middle-class housing market.
The city of Cleveland has more than 20,000 vacant lots. Many of these issues have been ignored for decades.
The project received the 2023 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Center for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies.
Triangular, trapezoidal and dogleg-shaped plots are squeezed between buildings built shortly after the Civil War.
As Cleveland’s Near West Side emerged as the city’s hub of redevelopment and culture in the 1990s, its Ironworker Cottage neighborhood came to be valued for its old-house charm, single-family density, and proximity to downtown.
As a result, developers and homeowners are now rethinking these sites.
The site has a width of 22 feet and a depth of 115 feet and is limited by the neighboring house, which borders the property line almost immediately to the south.
The house respects the narrow spatial constraints of the site while addressing the architectural character of its context.
The house explores the tension between abstraction and the real, with its architectural form located within and deviating from the urban house typology.
From the street, the Haunted House resembles a reduced gable-roofed Craftsman form, divided and subtracted along its vertical centerline.
The roofline slopes towards the north, matching the slope of its neighbours, placing the house within its context.
But this halved silhouette subverts the Native American type, producing a striking asymmetry that resolves the narrow constraints of the site.
The silhouette stretches along its narrow site, covered with black vertical cypress trees to the east and west and black corrugated metal to the north and south.
Passers-by see buildings that contradict their surroundings but defy simple typological interpretation.
The interior is organized around stacked linear staircases. Panes of glass cover the ground floor staircase, creating an ethereal interplay of light, shadow and reflection.
The staircase, illuminated by a skylight in the roof, terminates in a corridor that wraps around the private spaces on the second floor.
In a nod to the neighborhood, the bedroom ceilings are symmetrically vaulted into a subtractive gable form.
The basement houses secondary living space, bathroom and storage.
White surfaces contrast with black details, allowing the home’s geometry to speak for itself, while white oak floors and earthy furnishings infuse the interior with Midwestern warmth.
The haunted house demands contemplation without detaching from its environment, proving that serious residential architecture can appear in special locations in Cleveland and across the country.
Project: Haunted House
Architect: Horton Harper Architects
Design team: Michael Horton, Westleigh Harper, Kerry Sandoval
General Contractor: Ghost Construction Co., Ltd.
Client: Private
Photography: Horton Harper Architects, Christian Phillips and Peter Larson
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