"The best way to get your cost of construction down is to reduce your square footage, so we focused on cubic feet, on volume, rather than area," Jamie explains, pointing out the 14-foot ceilings in the living area. (Construction costs were about $320,000, which works out to $134 per square foot.) The idea was to create a small rectangular box that was modest in comparison to some of their neighbors but didn’t look dwarfed by them. ![]() The concept was pretty simple, driven by a relatively limited budget. "In hindsight I should’ve just taken a big loan, borrowed a salary, and knocked it out," he says now. (The first roof leaked and had to be ripped off and replaced entirely.) Jamie acted as the general contractor and somehow managed to build all of the house’s steel components, the decking and interior framing, and much of the furniture. The children-first Judith, now five, then Maple, now three-and the couple’s jobs, plus a major construction setback, made for a protracted, two-year construction. "We had two kids in the process of building, and both of us were working full time," Michele explains. And then, over the course of the next 20 months, life intervened. ![]() After the Darnells secured the loans and came up with the design, construction began. "Their aesthetic might be different," Jamie says, "but the main thing is that people were tolerant."įrom that point on, though, the smooth ride became bumpy. Around their tiny cul-de-sac, now lined with three other houses and a photo studio, some newly designed homes were already underway when they broke ground, making for understanding neighbors. The Darnells’ new neighborhood was already home to a handful of modernist houses, all built in recent years between clapboard Victorians and 19th-century folk-style structures. ![]() "We went home and scrambled to see how much money we didn’t have," Jamie remembers. They saw the land and knew they’d found their spot. A few steps away is a pedestrian bridge spanning the highway with a big cow statue on a pedestal in a park at the far end-fitting for a place known for its steaks and stockyards. The hunt eventually led them to a somewhat forlorn plot in the city’s Westside neighborhood overlooking an area known as the West Bottoms with Interstate 670 to the north. "We’ve really been invested in the redevelopment of downtown," Jamie says, "and that’s something we wanted to be a part of, too." So when the couple started looking for a piece of land, the same motivation informed their search. Jamie’s firm, El Dorado Inc., is based in the city and has been an agent for renewal in the downtown area. And we knew we wanted to build our own house, and that was definitely more of a possibility here." "Growing up here, the goal was always to leave," Michele explains. "Then I married an architect, and there’s a cabin there now."īut it took another decade before the couple started building their own house back in Kansas City. "We camped on that land forever," Michele says, remembering family trips. They soon married in the mountains of Colorado, a 13-hour drive to the west, near a patch of property owned by Michele’s family. "That was all by design," Jamie says.īoth natives of suburban Kansas City, Michele and Jamie met at the copy machine in Jamie’s architecture firm about 16 years ago. The eastern side of the house faces the Art Deco buildings of downtown Kansas City-the Paris of the Plains-rising out of some trees. Perched on a bluff with the former Kansas City Livestock Exchange and a knot of railroad tracks below, the copper-clad house looks westward toward the flat expanse of the country’s midsection and, in spirit at least, the mountains beyond. Michele and Jamie Darnell’s house sits at the edge of one thing and the beginning of another.
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