The most recent Google Street View of Detroit’s 17th Street is dated November 2022. Looking south from W Hancock Street, you can see that a single boarded-up home, surrounded by a landscape of vacant green lots, fills the foreground. Just down the block, however, change is stirring where a fresh concrete slab is contoured around the promise of a courtyard. Three years later, the site is home to an understated yet deeply unconventional house by architecture studio Dash Marshall.
Designed by Dash Marshall co-founder Bryan Boyer, the building was conceived as both a weekday office space and a weekend retreat — essentially, a second home for Boyer and his partner, Laura Lewis. “We could have built a house in the forest up north...
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In Detroit, Dash Marshall Designs a Courtyard House With No Bedrooms
A live–work build in the city’s Core City neighbourhood exalts family rituals — and makes a case for modern courtyard homes.