Architect Erick Mikiten on Why Universal Design Matters
The California architect and universal design expert talks about meeting client needs and going beyond building codes
This article is part of an editorial series for pros that highlights other home professionals in the Houzz community and their work. The photos show a selection of Mikiten Architecture’s designs. Answers have been lightly edited.
Architect Erick Mikiten met his wife, Elisa, an urban planner also trained in architecture, when she needed help with an accessibility project in graduate school. A former instructor recommended that she hire Mikiten, a teaching assistant at the time. The couple started their Northern California-based firm, Mikiten Architecture, in 1991. Today the company focuses primarily on residential architecture, with about a quarter of the business dedicated to universal design and accessibility consulting. Mikiten, who uses a wheelchair, is a member of the state Building Standards Commission and advises other firms and clients on how to ensure that their buildings and projects work for everyone.
We spoke with Mikiten about why architects should incorporate universal design into their processes and how his personal experience as a wheelchair rider informs his work.
Architect Erick Mikiten met his wife, Elisa, an urban planner also trained in architecture, when she needed help with an accessibility project in graduate school. A former instructor recommended that she hire Mikiten, a teaching assistant at the time. The couple started their Northern California-based firm, Mikiten Architecture, in 1991. Today the company focuses primarily on residential architecture, with about a quarter of the business dedicated to universal design and accessibility consulting. Mikiten, who uses a wheelchair, is a member of the state Building Standards Commission and advises other firms and clients on how to ensure that their buildings and projects work for everyone.
We spoke with Mikiten about why architects should incorporate universal design into their processes and how his personal experience as a wheelchair rider informs his work.
Why is it valuable for home pros to have a working knowledge of universal design?
Look at any statistics about the aging of the U.S. population and you’ll see that we have older people, often with income, who are going to need remodels to their homes and they’re going to need not just Band-Aids.
People don’t want stainless steel grab bars in their bathroom that transform a nice room into looking like a hospital room. They don’t want plastic and metal shower seats in their showers. They don’t want a ramp tacked on to the front or the back of their house to get in comfortably and safely. All of these things are symbols of a change in life that we’re all apprehensive of and that Western society doesn’t embrace.
So I think architects need to realize that’s where the population is going and that people need places they can grow old in and be comfortable in. When you’re in your 30s and you’re a new family and you’re doing a brand-new house or your first remodel, you think about the kids and sports and storage for skis and all of these exciting things.
For an architect to be responsible, he or she also needs to be thinking about when those 30-something parents are in their 60s and they’ve fallen in absolute love with their home, are you going to design their home in a way that they’re going to be forced to tear it apart to make it work? Or be forced to leave their home and their neighbors and their neighborhood? Or even if the client doesn’t ask for it, are you going to be responsible and future-proof their home?
Look at any statistics about the aging of the U.S. population and you’ll see that we have older people, often with income, who are going to need remodels to their homes and they’re going to need not just Band-Aids.
People don’t want stainless steel grab bars in their bathroom that transform a nice room into looking like a hospital room. They don’t want plastic and metal shower seats in their showers. They don’t want a ramp tacked on to the front or the back of their house to get in comfortably and safely. All of these things are symbols of a change in life that we’re all apprehensive of and that Western society doesn’t embrace.
So I think architects need to realize that’s where the population is going and that people need places they can grow old in and be comfortable in. When you’re in your 30s and you’re a new family and you’re doing a brand-new house or your first remodel, you think about the kids and sports and storage for skis and all of these exciting things.
For an architect to be responsible, he or she also needs to be thinking about when those 30-something parents are in their 60s and they’ve fallen in absolute love with their home, are you going to design their home in a way that they’re going to be forced to tear it apart to make it work? Or be forced to leave their home and their neighbors and their neighborhood? Or even if the client doesn’t ask for it, are you going to be responsible and future-proof their home?
How would you say your own experience as a wheelchair rider has influenced that work and your work as an architect in general?
It’s very different for the average architect who hasn’t experienced disability to look at the complex codes or the Americans With Disabilities Act and create something, and to put those puzzle pieces of codes and dimensions together into something that’s an architectural sculpture.
What often happens is people will design a beautiful bathroom that is like bathrooms they’ve designed before, and then they take the ADA requirements that are meant for public buildings and graft them onto a private home. So you wind up with these bathrooms that look like a hybrid. They’re not integrated. The accessibility isn’t invisible, it stands out like a sore thumb.
So that’s one thing, how it looks, but the other thing is how it works, and that’s what my experience really gives me insight into. Which is that a grab bar has a certain height that building codes say it should be, but for different clients I might put that grab bar below the code number.
The grab bar isn’t required in a single-family home, so you can put it wherever you want, but I’ll think about how that client needs to use the grab bar. There are so many nuances of the geometries that are required for daily living that the building code is just, again, scraping the surface of what people’s real needs are.
Understanding Universal Design
It’s very different for the average architect who hasn’t experienced disability to look at the complex codes or the Americans With Disabilities Act and create something, and to put those puzzle pieces of codes and dimensions together into something that’s an architectural sculpture.
What often happens is people will design a beautiful bathroom that is like bathrooms they’ve designed before, and then they take the ADA requirements that are meant for public buildings and graft them onto a private home. So you wind up with these bathrooms that look like a hybrid. They’re not integrated. The accessibility isn’t invisible, it stands out like a sore thumb.
So that’s one thing, how it looks, but the other thing is how it works, and that’s what my experience really gives me insight into. Which is that a grab bar has a certain height that building codes say it should be, but for different clients I might put that grab bar below the code number.
The grab bar isn’t required in a single-family home, so you can put it wherever you want, but I’ll think about how that client needs to use the grab bar. There are so many nuances of the geometries that are required for daily living that the building code is just, again, scraping the surface of what people’s real needs are.
Understanding Universal Design
Is there a project that sticks out as being particularly memorable?
We did a house about 12 years ago that gave us an opportunity to take a really holistic view of this family’s needs. There were three generations that needed to be accommodated in the household.
The grandmother was coming to live with them, so we needed to create space that was accessible for her. The wife had muscular dystrophy, so she used a very big electric wheelchair and had a very limited range of motion. She loved to sew and cook, she was quite an artist with both, and she was barely able to do either because their existing house was limiting her abilities.
We were charged with reimagining what a house would be that would fit her, allow her to age and still use it, that would work for their then-teenage kids as well as her elderly mother and that would provide a secondary unit that could be used as a caretaker’s unit if that would be needed in the future.
What we did with them, and what we do with all of our clients, is we created a workbook that’s a series of questions and exercises to break down the typical conversations that an architect and a client have. This process is much more detailed and allows the client to take this workbook and spend what’s sometimes a week, sometimes three weeks, filling it out and thinking about their life, thinking about places they’ve lived before, special spaces they’ve experienced and also responding to more technical questions.
It’s a lot of effort for people, but they always emerge from it with a new vision of what it is that they want. Inevitably people say, “I realized that what I was asking the three architects who I interviewed for is not what I actually need. What I need is these things that strike my soul, and I hadn’t connected with those because I was just thinking about the fact that my family is tripping over each other and our house is too small.”
This Frank Lloyd Wright Home Is a Model of Universal Design
We did a house about 12 years ago that gave us an opportunity to take a really holistic view of this family’s needs. There were three generations that needed to be accommodated in the household.
The grandmother was coming to live with them, so we needed to create space that was accessible for her. The wife had muscular dystrophy, so she used a very big electric wheelchair and had a very limited range of motion. She loved to sew and cook, she was quite an artist with both, and she was barely able to do either because their existing house was limiting her abilities.
We were charged with reimagining what a house would be that would fit her, allow her to age and still use it, that would work for their then-teenage kids as well as her elderly mother and that would provide a secondary unit that could be used as a caretaker’s unit if that would be needed in the future.
What we did with them, and what we do with all of our clients, is we created a workbook that’s a series of questions and exercises to break down the typical conversations that an architect and a client have. This process is much more detailed and allows the client to take this workbook and spend what’s sometimes a week, sometimes three weeks, filling it out and thinking about their life, thinking about places they’ve lived before, special spaces they’ve experienced and also responding to more technical questions.
It’s a lot of effort for people, but they always emerge from it with a new vision of what it is that they want. Inevitably people say, “I realized that what I was asking the three architects who I interviewed for is not what I actually need. What I need is these things that strike my soul, and I hadn’t connected with those because I was just thinking about the fact that my family is tripping over each other and our house is too small.”
This Frank Lloyd Wright Home Is a Model of Universal Design
We created the secondary unit upstairs. Their oldest son moved up there as his college apartment. Later it was used as a caretaker’s unit. And then we created a little en suite section of the downstairs for the grandmother.
I sat with the wife and measured what her reach was, what was comfortable, how much she could hold and lift, and really got a sense of her physical abilities so that we could design something that really matched her needs.
That was a deeper investigation than we would typically do for somebody, but everybody’s got special needs. We’ve got a couple that we’re starting a project for now and they’re 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-5, so they have different needs than the average person. I like to say nobody’s actually average.
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I sat with the wife and measured what her reach was, what was comfortable, how much she could hold and lift, and really got a sense of her physical abilities so that we could design something that really matched her needs.
That was a deeper investigation than we would typically do for somebody, but everybody’s got special needs. We’ve got a couple that we’re starting a project for now and they’re 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-5, so they have different needs than the average person. I like to say nobody’s actually average.
More for Pros on Houzz
Read more stories for pros
Browse millions of photos for inspiration
Talk with your peers in the Pro-to-Pro discussions
Join the Houzz Trade Program
Who: Erick Mikiten of Mikiten Architecture
Location: Berkeley, California
Type of business: Residential architecture firm
Specialty: Universal design and universal design consulting
Years in business: 29
Number of employees: Four to seven
Number of projects per year: 20 to 25