Living near Jackson, Wyo., in a four-bedroom 1960s split-level house with their nearly college-age son, Darcey and Mike Prichard considered the next phase of their life. They had an urge to downsize in the same community where they had spent the last two decades, in the suburb of Wilson, near the Jackson Hole and Snow King resorts, where they loved to ski. But Jackson had become a billionaires’ haven, where the stratospheric price of real estate reflected not only nationwide affordability problems but also a dearth of land for private development.
The most practical way to shrink their footprint, the Prichards decided, was to build an accessory dwelling unit, or A.D.U., on their 0.76-acre lot and occupy it while renting out their existing house.
County regulations limit the size of A.D.U.s to 1,000 square feet. Ms. Prichard, 59, began shopping around for prefabricated houses that fit that requirement. When she found a model she liked, she showed it to a colleague, Eric Logan, whose immediate response was, “Come on, you can do better than that.”
Mr. Logan wasn’t insulting prefabs, he said. It was just that he’s a partner at CLB Architects in Jackson, where Ms. Prichard is also a partner and the marketing director. Mr. Prichard, 56, is a homebuilder with his own company, Dembergh Construction. If anyone had the wherewithal to build a ground-up house, it was this bunch.
And there were good reasons to go custom. A factory-made house would have limited the couple’s options to integrate outdoor space, or to put the living quarters on the second floor so that the family could feel suspended within a canopy of aspen and cottonwood trees on their property, which is exactly what they ended up doing. “We spent a lot of time on ladders figuring out what the view was going to look like and how to orient the home,” Mr. Prichard said.
