Porch House

Designed by HILLWORKS

Location: Alabama, USA — Type: Atriums, Gardens, Post-Industrial — Built: 2022 —

Special Mention by the LILA 2025 Jury

The jury recognizes in Porch House a promising beginning—a careful act of reclamation that allows the site’s residual character to remain present while offering space for new life to gradually assert itself through a slow dialogue between the existing walls, new architecture and evolving plants, negotiating their space in the ruin. Situated within the remains of a former warehouse, the design accepts the given conditions—the weathered walls, industrial remnants, and raw materiality—as active participants in the emerging landscape. Porch House demonstrates a productive position for small-scale landscape interventions: embracing incompleteness, cultivating hybrid conditions, and staging the possibility for future ecological and spatial complexity to unfold.

– from the award statements

See all LILA recognitions or visit LILA website

Situated in the heart of Opelika’s historic cotton warehouses, the Porch House reclaims an empty brick ruin for residential use. A modest streetside entrance opens into a secret garden shaded with a canopy of redbud and black gum.

The yard is both intimate and flexible, lushly textured and open to the sky. Swaths of wooly planting offer occupiable nooks and crannies within the garden, while the courtyard walls soften the urban clamor of Opelika’s downtown. The native planting design emphasizes a complex tapestry of colors, textures, and heights, ensuring year-round visual and sensory delight. A native palette of flowering perennials, grasses, shrubs, and trees provides layered visual depth and seasonal adaptability.

The residence—nearly equal parts interior and porch—is nestled within this verdant enclave. The design borrows the weathered textures, graffiti, and historic signage left over from the site’s past as a car shop. This incorporation of remnant elements contrasts with the simple materials, textures, and colors of the new construction, highlighting a dialogue between old and new.

Each view from the house fosters an immersive connection with the garden outside. The generous covered porch is the most prominent space within the house and gardens, drawing the outdoors in and the indoors out.