They downsized by selling their house and building in their garden

A few years ago, Karen Ford, a landscape architect, committed an act that one might imagine would be traumatic for a member of her profession: She killed her garden.

The doomed Eden had covered one side of the double lot in northeast Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband, John Dingler, lived in a Craftsman house. “It was a thriving, interesting garden that I inherited and embellished over 20 years,” said Ford, 76.

But the couple, whose five adult sons were scattered from Los Angeles to Savannah, Georgia, felt it was time to downsize from the three-story 1909 Sears kit house to a home with no stairs. (They had to walk 30 of them just to do laundry.) After caring for her own older parents, Ford asked herself: “What do we really need? And how can we take all these things into consideration and still have a place that looks beautiful and is functional for anybody at any age?”

A condo in downtown Portland wasn’t an option for Dingler, 80, a coastal oceanographer. “It just didn’t feel right to me,” he said. Besides, they liked their neighborhood, the Alberta Arts District.

So in 2022, the couple divided the lot, sold the Craftsman, and uprooted the garden to make way for a 1,256-square-foot, three-bedroom house on one level. Now, Ford can look over the border to her old digs, but she’s not looking back. “As a landscape architect, that’s something that I’ve had to learn to do with my projects,” she said. “You just walk away.”

Designed by Thomas Robinson, the founding principal of LEVER Architecture, the modern wedge of corrugated metal and glass has, if anything, brought the couple closer to nature. Robinson, who first got to know Ford when she created a garden for his own house, said his mission was “leveraging the sense of landscape that is really at the heart of who Karen is and her designs.”

The house’s Corten steel exterior, for example, which has a variable patina depending on how much each part is exposed to the elements, “interacts with the earth and feels very much connected to the climate,” he said.

Two large, covered porches, in front and back, allow the couple to engage with their neighbors and surroundings more easily than they could in their more inward-looking Craftsman. Now, Robinson said, when he stops by he’s likely to find Ford working on a porch in the rain.

Before getting started, Ford handed Robinson five questions she borrowed from artist Laurie Anderson referring to any creative endeavor: Is it simple enough? Is it complicated enough? Is it crazy enough? Is it beautiful enough? Is it stupid enough? She compared the house that came out of the process, which was completed in 11 months at a cost of $900 a square foot, to a Swiss Army knife: It is both complicated and beautifully simple, a crazy (though hardly stupid) combination to pull off.

The house unfolds this way: After crossing the front porch and its pair of butterfly chairs, one enters a stub of a hallway that keeps the act of discovery a bit suspenseful. “A lot of times in these small houses, you open the door, and you feel like you’re everywhere,” Robinson said. “You’re in the kitchen, you’re in the living room.”

The foyer is not just a delaying tactic but a gallery where works from the couple’s pared-down art collection are displayed. (Before the move, they purged three-quarters of their belongings, Ford said.)

From the little gallery, a left turn leads into open space brightened by a skylight. At the front end of the room is a wood-paneled, eat-in kitchen with thick concrete floors. Here, as elsewhere in the house, the floors have been enriched with rebar to prevent cracking. Ford has a deep aversion to ruptured concrete, although she is fine with the scratches on her stainless steel countertops. “We didn’t want anything in the house to feel precious,” she said.

At the other end is a living room with a fireplace and a wall of glass. This area walks out to the back porch, which is furnished with a table that seats 14. No longer does the couple have to clamber up and down half a dozen exterior stairs when hosting a garden party.

Running parallel to the open-plan living room and kitchen are two mirror-image corner bedrooms, each with an en suite bathroom. The primary bedroom looks out to the newly landscaped backyard and has an Eames LCW chair — known as the “punishment chair” because it’s where misbehaving grandchildren spend timeouts in midcentury comfort.

The front bedroom, also furnished with Eames pieces, is an office but was designed possibly to become a caretaker’s quarters. The space mirroring the primary closet is now a laundry room, but could become the caretaker’s kitchenette.

Between these rooms is the third bedroom, which works as a sitting room or guest room. A key to the thoughtful use of space is the almost total absence of hinges. Only the front door swings open; the other nine doors slide.

The house has been designed to be warm in winter and cool in summer, with reduced reliance on fossil fuel. It is super insulated, from the slab it sits on to the ventilated air cavity in its roof, and it has a heat-recovery system.

As for the new garden surrounding the little building, Ford has gathered a variety of bushy and stately plants, such as the row of hornbeams that create a border between the new and old dwellings. A number are elevated in raised Corten planters so as not to distract from the architecture. They also involve less bending over.

“The idea is, I’m going to do this crazy meadow that’s up in the air,” she said.

She added that it was “a little weird” to be living next to her former house. In the early days, she and Dingler occasionally pulled into their old driveway out of habit. But the new owners are lovely, she said, and even asked for the Latin names of the plants left behind.