Posted on: Friday, June 13, 2003
Architect blends accessibility, memories for mom
By Alan J. Heavens
Knight Ridder News Service
Dorothy Johnson was starting to have trouble caring for herself.
The Cape Cod-style house in Mineola, Long Island, N.Y., in which she lived for 50 years with her husband and raised their only child was beginning to work against her as advancing age slowed her down.
Adding to her physical difficulties was the fact that the former teacher was born with sight in only one eye, and that eye was beginning to fail.
A design challenge
Alan Johnson, a Philadelphia architect, began thinking about ways to make his widowed mother's life easier and safer without altering it too much.
Johnson crafted a solution that not only pleased his mother, but also serves as a model for others with disabilities.
Dorothy Johnson, 91, now lives at the Fountains, the high-rise continuing-care residence in the city's Franklin Town section.
But the two years or so she lived in a light, airy apartment on the second floor of a former veal-deboning plant were a high point in the relationship with her son.
Johnson describes the accommodations he made to the building for his mother as "not perfectly acceptable under the standards of the Americans With Disabilities Act," but would meet the everyday requirements of many with disabilities.
He ruled out putting his mother's apartment on the ground floor of the building because his office was there. That's when the second floor — a relatively open space once rented as an artist's loft — became the solution.
It would require an elevator to get there, but accommodating one was possible — the building had a shaft from its deboning-plant days that could be easily, though expensively, extended.
The second floor also had a large, tiled bathroom with a double shower, once used by plant employees at the end of their workdays.
In that space, Johnson crafted a wheelchair-accessible shower from pieces, including a seat, bought at Home Depot.
Removable foam on the floor of the shower leveled the space with the bathroom floor outside.
He spent less than $1,000 crafting the shower, after seeing estimates of more than $3,000 for prefab models.
Condensing a world
The chief goal was to condense his mother's world — keeping what was absolutely necessary to soften the effects of the move, while reducing the contents of a two-story house. That was complicated by the fact that his mother's favorite furnishings had been made by his father.
"My father had built a corner hutch that had to come" along, Johnson said. "Mother needed to make the final decision, so to help her, I gave her 12 pieces of masking tape and told her to pick a corresponding number of pieces of furniture that she wanted to take with her."
Much to his surprise, she did it quickly and efficiently, with little visible emotion.
To create plenty of sources of natural light to help his mother cope with her failing eyesight, Johnson installed large windows and self-flashing skylights.
Color is almost as important as light in accessible-housing design. For example, to help his mother find doors to rooms and the apartment itself, he painted them yellow to make them easily distinguishable from the walls.
The kitchen was a design challenge, and an expensive one at that, because all the appliances needed to be accessible from a seated position.
A wall oven and separate range added up to $1,000, about three times the cost of a comparable combined version.
The single sink became a double one, with the garbage disposal in the smaller side, which opened up the space under the larger sink for accessibility and storage.
Because the kitchen was white, different colors of masking tape were used to distinguish cabinets, the stove and oven, and the like.
In the final analysis, it is all about ingenuity.
