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Raccoon House
Minneapolis, Minnesota
A home for every season of life—Raccoon House embraces the future with flexible living, universal accessibility, and zero-energy readiness. By quietly doubling site density through an internal ADU, it aligns personal sustainability with citywide housing goals. Encourages supports shared life together valuing interdependence over independence.
Tucked in South Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood, Raccoon House is more than a new single-family residence—it’s a prototype for resilient, future-oriented urban living. The home replaces a long-dilapidated structure once inhabited by a family of raccoons, whose memory lives on in the project’s name. In its place now stands a fully electric, zero-energy ready home, equipped with high-efficiency heat pumps, solar infrastructure, and EV charging.
But what makes Raccoon House truly future-ready is its social and civic intelligence. Built in a neighborhood dominated by traditional single-family zoning, the design quietly introduces increased residential density through a fully integrated internal ADU—doubling the number of housing units typically allowed on a lot of this size. It’s a subtle yet significant act of zoning reform by design, reinforcing Minneapolis’s broader policy goals of gentle density and more inclusive housing typologies.
The ADU itself is universally accessible and designed for long-term flexibility. It can serve as a rental unit, an extension of the main home, or a single-level residence for aging in place. Whether supporting intergenerational living, offsetting mortgage costs, or adapting to life’s changing seasons, Raccoon House demonstrates how architecture can align personal sustainability with collective urban progress.
