Architecture students designed, built this Kansas home. There was a waitlist of buyers.

Before Studio 804 even completed the narrow house at 1040 New York St. in Lawrence, Kansas, interested buyers were waiting in the wings.

The home’s structure was simple — straight walls clad in white siding and a gabled roof covered in corrugated metal — and its footprint modest. Sited on a rectangular infill plot, the 1,850-square-foot residence had double-height, ground-floor living spaces, a loft-style second story that hosted a bedroom and additional sitting space, and an accessory dwelling unit with a garage and the second bedroom. But for its simplicity, the property came with a backstory primed to appeal to an artsy East Lawrence buyer pool: University of Kansas architecture students working under local nonprofit Studio 804 wholly designed and built the custom spec house.

Dan Rockhill, a KU professor of architecture and executive director at Studio 804, explained that those students are the ones who give the property its edge. This year, like most students in the class, they gave tours to interested buyers.

It’s an effective strategy.

“How often does anyone have an opportunity to talk with the people that have physically designed and built the house?” Rockhill asked. “You can’t help but have that passion and that pride and fullness kind of soak into you because [the student tour guides] are so happy. I mean, it’s their baby.”

This year’s house on New York Street is at least the studio’s 19th residential project, Rockhill speculated. Although the nonprofit runs as a class and gets audited by the university each year, it doesn’t get funding from the university; it operates on its own and offers a “boot camp” design studio for M.Arch students, Rockhill said. “We work six days a week. We work very long hours … it’s a good experience.”

For some of the students, the class also rips off the Band-Aid when it comes to physical construction experience. Especially in today’s increasingly virtual environment, some students lack savvy when it comes to building, Rockhill noted. With these projects, they’re keeping track of costs, framing the structure, pouring concrete, installing finishes — all taught and attentively supervised by Rockhill.

The work must “pass a very high standard,” he said. “You can see it in the work, and there isn’t anything in these houses that isn’t custom.”

Rockhill arrived at KU around 1980, when he was hired to teach a graduate design studio. While these intensive studio courses can lean heavily on the theoretical, he explained, students are also trying “to move on with their lives” — staring down graduation, bulking up their portfolios, and notching job interviews. Even then, however, studio work was "always make-believe,” he said.

At the same time, Rockhill was running a design-build practice in Lawrence, constructing unusual homes in what remained an aesthetically conservative region. But contracting work “that was a little bit different” became expensive, so Rockhill brought everything in-house and stopped subcontracting.

This squashed Rockhill between “this make-believe world of teaching architecture” and the “very hard reality” of construction deadlines, he said. One day, Rockhill found himself lamenting to his students about falling behind on the physical work, and “the students said: ‘Yeah, well, that sounds awesome. We would love to do something like that.’” So Rockhill started Studio 804.

In the decades since its founding, the studio has produced a built project each year: some years commercial, others residential. Each structure, however, begins with a piece of land, which Rockhill starts searching for about a year before the start of fall semester.

Ideally, the site must be undeveloped; any existing building or demolition requirements can slow Studio 804’s work.

“I need to find a site where I can hit the ground running,” he said. The infill plot on New York Street was just that. Although narrow, it was empty and workable, so that semester's students got to work, letting the lot dictate a long and slender home wrapped by a patio. At the home’s rear, that patio connects to a 580-square-foot accessory dwelling unit (a garage topped with the home’s second bedroom).

Another important factor in Rockhill’s site selection: sunlight. It shouldn’t be a site shrouded by trees, Rockhill explained. Although wonderful, the arboreal cover can hinder the performance of solar panels, and the nonprofit doesn’t want to be in the business of cutting down trees.

Those solar panels play an essential role in the property's thorough sustainability scheme; in fact, the home could become Studio 804’s 18th consecutive LEED Platinum-rated residence. The house has a 16-panel array positioned on its roof — each generates 535 watts, offsetting the home's energy needs — and its student designers oriented the structure to embrace passive solar principles. The home’s sizable south-facing windows pull sunlight inside the two-story structure, where it shines on a polished-concrete floor, trapping in heat that it emits at night.

The glass also helps open up the residence, adding to the double-height, inclined ceilings. “That gives a much better sense of the volume,” Rockhill said, and “that volumetric feel is really kind of liberating. It feels quite nice.”

In the studio's early years, Rockhill and his students focused on home affordability, but that emphasis shifted toward sustainability and energy use, even before the terms became commonplace in the building industry. The emphasis does not, he said, come at the cost of affordability.

In addition to full student labor throughout the construction process, each Studio 804 project — this one included — strives against a dominant “disposable Kleenex culture,” Rockhill said, that’s all too ready to channel used building materials into a landfill. Instead, the design relies almost entirely on donated and reused materials that keep costs down and sustainability up.

“I’m just terribly frugal,” Rockhill said. “I try to repurpose, resave, remake."

Given some donated materials and the sheer amount of sweat equity that Studio 804 students put into the project, estimating the cost is tricky, Rockhill said. If the New York Street house had been subcontracted and built traditionally, he speculated, it would’ve run a homeowner north of $1 million on the open market.

“We are able to sell the houses quite seriously for less than it would cost if you bought one on the open market with the same stuff,” he said. New York Street sold for just under $750,000.

The fall semester began in August, bringing Studio 804 the designers and builders of its next project, which will repurpose Glulam beams sourced from a demolition project in Los Angeles. That house, slated for completion in 2026, is just getting started.