Ainsley Dahl
2026
The single-family home has historically failed women — designed to confine them, render their labor invisible, and sever them from collective life.The single-family home has historically failed women — designed to confine them, render their labor invisible, and sever them from collective life. HER HOUSE asks: what if the role of a life partner were fulfilled by a chosen collective instead? HER HOUSE is a living system for women seeking platonic intimacy, safety, and non-familial kinship — women in their thirties through sixties, with children or without, frustrated with conventional domestic space. Architecture has rarely been designed around the female body, its rhythms, or its needs.
Conceived as a Trojan horse, the project occupies floors 18–21 of Building A at East Midtown Plaza. Rather than gutting the building, HER HOUSE works with what exists — preserving bedroom walls at the center while freeing surrounding space for radical intervention. Bedrooms organize around configurations of kinship: single women, women with children, friends, partners. The domestic labor society has always hidden — childcare, cooking, laundry — is pulled from private units and made communal. Exterior walls are cut open, expanding terraces into collective ones where labor spills outside, visible to the city. Two double-height voids connect floors, making the labor of one felt on the next. HER HOUSE gives what society assigned to women the most architecturally significant space in the building — with room to grow, and room to shift.