Gregory La Vardera Architect

A short video of me telling my story of Modern House Plans at the Ignite Philly event, Oct 09:

In 2002 I began offering house plans to the public on this web site. In the years that followed I built up the collection to over a dozen different designs you will find offered today. People have embraced these house designs and are building them all across the country. Customers' houses have appeared in a range of prominent publications such as Dwell, The New York Times, Metropolitan Home, and more. I've been recognized as a leader in the House Plan Industry, disrupting the status quo, causing existing publishers to rethink their approach, and inspiring new entries into the house plan market.

I run my architecture practice out of a small modern office building of my own design in Merchantville, NJ. That's just outside of Philadelphia. The building was constructed in 1999, an addition on top of an existing storefront. It was a test-bed for many of the affordable architectural elements that are common in my house plan designs. That's my studio in the title image at the top of this page. I started my practice in 1994 and I've designed a wide range of projects for residential and business clients. I continue that work along with my House Plans.

Here is a short interview about my house plans with blogger Lloyd Alter from TreeHugger.com:

In 2001 I saw that there was an unserved community of people in the housing market. These were people who loved good design and who loved modern design. For this group "Modern" was more than just a house style. Modern meant a simpler life, a life free of the burden of keeping up with the Jones, free of confining yourself to the conventional image of home and success. Yet these were people of ordinary means who could not afford to hire an architect to create a custom house design. These are modest, even frugal people that are passionate consumers of design in almost every category of consumer goods, but not their home. The marketplace simply offered no options for a modern home. Almost uniformly they were forced to settle for a conventional house. It just did not seem fair that there was no choice, no options.

So I set out to study the situation. Where do houses come from if they don't come from an architect? One of the biggest sources of home designs is the Stock Plan industry. House plans cost much less than custom design, and they are widely used. Yet there was little by way of modern design and what was offered was poor quality. I found these consumers were too design savvy to go for that. They follow current design trends and they can tell the difference between a good modern design and a superficial rehash of the status quo. The situation demanded a new kind of stock house plan, one that I was prepared to create. Modern House Plans. I thought that this was something I could do, a way to change the world even if just a little bit.