The Owners of this twenty-five-foot-wide lot in Chicago?s Roscoe Village area asked for a compact home with modest finishes, but also one with Italianate façades painted in the polychrome palettes of the era.

Avatar designed a 3,200 square foot home on three levels, adapting Italianate features to a narrow urban lot. The heavily bracketed front gable design includes denticulated frieze boards, a trifoil feature window, period window trim and a decorative chimney top. Lacquered copper and ornamental metal accents a balcony over the front entry.

The plan make the most of the narrow floor plates and limited view corridors by maximizing circulation efficiency within and between carefully articulated spaces connected by skylit two-story stairs.