Recognized with the 2026 AIA Housing Award in the Community-Engaged Design category, Bozeman Cohousing is the first net zero energy cohousing community in the United States and the first cohousing community in Montana. The project consists of 43 homes and extensive common spaces, sited on 5.3 acres. Studio cohab set out to create a community design model, weaving together space, light, and material to create beautiful environments, while embracing an architect-activist role in the social and economic context of the project.
Cohousing is the combination of private homes and social spaces designed to foster strong interpersonal relationships. The common house is the heart of the community: a stage for frequent community dinners, neighborhood meetings, and informal gatherings. In an age of epidemic social isolation, community dinners form the social core of cohousing. The architecture celebrates the shared dining experience with intimate elegance. Members of the community take turns to prepare community meals in the common kitchen. The design provides an intuitive and luxurious environment to cook at scale.
The common house also features a glass-covered atrium. The central covered lane joins eight dwellings to the robust common facilities, which become an extension of each home. Like pre-automobile urban areas, this lane is scaled to the human body, with rhythmic juxtaposition of volumes and textures. The atrium also provides perennial indoor-outdoor space. Even in the frigid winters of Montana, the covered lane joins homes and common spaces. This creates an environment where, in the face of an increasingly volatile climate, wheels always roll and anytime is a good time for a glass of wine with a neighbor.
Participatory Design Process
Bozeman Cohousing was developed through a participatory design process. Studio Cohab facilitated design workshops with the future residents using consensus decision-making to create a community-based and occupant-centered project. As a result, the site planning emphasizes walkability over car access: clustered parking is at the periphery while pedestrian paths and courtyards connect the homes, creating a safe, community-oriented environment.
The initial participatory site planning workshop uncovered a nested pod site concept, which was carried through to completion.
Community-Based Site Design
The community is comprised of five pods each with its own unique architectural identity. This creates smaller more intimate social groups and a stronger sense of identity. The pods each open onto the community’s central open space and common facilities, maintaining cross-community interaction, while privacy is provided in back yards around the perimeter of the site. Layers of spatial definition facilitate the close proximity of homes while maintaining a high level of privacy. These semi-private and semi-common spaces facilitate comfortable unplanned interactions.
Privacy Balancing Community
In a robust community, access to privacy is equally important. Residential floor plans and the site planning were carefully choreographed to provide private indoor and outdoor spaces for each dwelling.
Efficiency with Identity
Compact, repeated floor plans and varied massing lowered costs while emphasizing each home’s identity. Diverse unit types, color accents, and landscaping, created distinct, visually rich pods. To support accessibility for all residents, Universal Design and age-in-place techniques were implemented. The nine dwelling configurations ranging from studio to three-bedroom all employ compact but comfortable design. The studio units, when sold, were the most affordable market-rate housing in the city. In addition to the inherent affordability of this design approach, two subsidized permanently affordable homes were created through the participatory design process, funded voluntarily by the future residents and matched by the developer with additional city funding. Studio Cohab also leveraged a project need to create broader housing affordability reform, successfully passing a zoning amendment to better accommodate middle housing typologies city-wide.
Sustainability and Building Performance
Sustainability is the core value of Bozeman Cohousing, which Studio Cohab focused into the net-zero energy goal and achieved through a combination of passive strategies, efficient systems, and on-site generation. Achieving net zero energy (NZE) on a workforce housing budget with a production builder required careful collaboration and material selection. Energy-cost modeling identified the most affordable approach.
For climate resilience as well as efficiency, heat recovery ventilation provides healthy indoor air even during peak fire season. The project is all electric, using heat pump water heating, space heating, and clothes drying. Each building employs ZIP System R-12 sheathing for continuous insulation and air-sealing, complemented by high-performance windows for thermal performance and daylighting. Blower-door tests confirmed an average air-tightness level of below 1.0 ACH, meeting Passive House requirements.
The efficient designs were modelled at an energy-use intensity (EUI) of 16 kBTU/sf/year, well below Passive House benchmarks. Actual energy use has been below this benchmark without including onsite energy production. The on-site energy is produced by solar PV arrays that offset 90–105 percent of the community’s total energy demand, achieving the net zero goal.
Atrium Cool Tower
The common house atrium creates a delightful all-weather lane connecting eight homes to common facilities and is fully passively conditioned, providing varied yet
comfortable temperatures. This first known downdraft evaporative cooltower in a
northern climate cools the space in summer. The 2,000-square-foot shared sunspace with skylights acts as a passive solar collector and thermal buffer. Natural ventilation and the cooling tower provide seasonal comfort without air conditioning.
Materials and Carbon Reduction
The project minimises embodied carbon by reducing concrete use in foundations and site paving. A permeable grass-reinforcement system replaces roughly half of the asphalt typically used in fire lanes. Sustainable finishes include wood-core flooring, paper-composite countertops in common spaces, and community-built dining tables crafted from reclaimed site timber.
An independent study by Professor Jesse Sherry (Eckerd College) found that Bozeman Cohousing residents’ per-capita building carbon footprint is 1.6 tCO₂e per year, around half the state average. Including solar offsets, operational emissions drop to roughly 10 percent of the Montana average.
Sustainable Mobility
The project’s infill location allows most residents to walk or bicycle to schools and Montana State University. Every covered parking space includes Level 2 EV charging, supporting an EV ownership rate far higher than the state average.
Designing for Water
Bioswales clean stormwater along pedestrian paths, ecological restoration
revitalizes the riparian corridor, and clustered parking creates a fully pedestrian
environment that prioritizes connections between people and access to
greenspaces over cars.
A Model for Sustainable Living
Bozeman Cohousing represents a trailblazing model for ethical, environmentally responsible, and community-driven development. Built on a tight budget, it shows how thoughtful design can address today’s environmental and housing affordability challenges.
