The Carriage at Allen’s Landing was the first project I designed at J Davis Architects.  I had inherited the floor plans from a previous project and was asked to put a new face on the exterior.  The snout development town home concept is very common in the triangle area and usually approached with the idea of incorporating the garages to the architecture that it was overshadowing.  I took the approach to accentuate the obvious instead of mitigating the fact that it was essentially a community where the car and garage dominates. Instead of mitigating that fact I saw an opportunity to celebrate the garages by giving the three and four units building the look of a large carriage house remembering the beauty of the Carriage Houses of the Hudson Valley.  Typically in these types of developments large double, sometimes triple, garages act as a barricade between neighbors but by curving the garage front walls down into the landscape to create courtyard walls it provide an opportunity to promote community.  Integrating the landscape with the architecture invited the residents to linger a bit longer in their entrance courts as they came and went from their automobile. Each entrance court has been personalized with plantings and furniture, which I’m happy to see, has really promoted a sense of community by activating the street life.  This received Best-In-Living Award from Building Magazine.