Brooklyn-based studio Out of Line has completed an attached accessory dwelling unit that extends a New Jersey suburban home by extending its colours and creating a gable form in the negative for the entryway.
Known as Swoop ADU, the 750-square-foot (70-square-metre) dwelling adds two bedrooms and a bathroom to a 1988 split-level home in South Orange, New Jersey.
Out of Line, which was founded by Danielle Kemble and Sevki Topcu in 2021, completed the ADU in 2025 to create a separate home for a homeowner who lives with her daughter’s family.
The project allows the client to start a new chapter of her life, in proximity to her family, while maintaining privacy and independence in the neighbourhood’s first ADU.
The project sits on a cul-de-sac of near-identical houses constructed by a single developer, each with a gabled roof that defines the upper boundary of the neighbourhood.
The design reveals itself in a peek-a-boo moment as neighbours move along the rounded curb, breaking the uniformity of the context.
“Swoop ADU engages this ubiquity by inversion – instead of adding another gabled mass, it subtracts one,” the studio explained.
“The absence of the gable forms a carved-out negative space that establishes the entry.”
Rather than mimicking the gable above, the team inverted the form for a diagonal butterfly roof that appears flat from the street but dips down when viewed from the side.
A small upper terrace connects the ADU to the main house.
The main home had been unchanged since it was built. However, to unify the existing house with the new portion, the team traded the original brick veneer on the lower half of the house for charcoal grey stucco and the upper vinyl siding with light grey fibre cement panels.
The material change maintained the split-level character while creating opportunities for playfulness – like in turning the siding 90 degrees on the ADU and allowing the datum line to “swoop” up and down around the openings.
“The works of Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Mangold were key influences for their way of using reduction to convey geometric moves, shaped edges against flat color fields and linework that implies a continuation beyond the surface it’s drawn on,” the studio told Dezeen.
“We understood the material seam on this project in the same way, abstracted as a line that reads continuously from the main home to the ADU.”
The reimagined gable entry is a sheltered transition to the ADU that ushers the occupants through a compact threshold into a 14-foot-tall (4.2-metre-tall) living space that looks out to the backyard.
Directly opposite the entry is a large picture window in the living room and a glass patio door that creates a connection to the garden and fills the compact space with natural light.
“Interior elements reference the geometry of the facade,” the studio said, explaining that the living room’s custom built-in in the living room takes cues from the curved forms outside.
The kitchen features Reform cabinetry and grey terrazzo surfaces, centred around a circular window that looks out to the cul-de-sac.
Other sculptural ADUs recently completed in the United States include an ipe wood-cladded curving home in Los Angeles by Byben, a masonry block attachment in Phoenix by Benjamin Hall Design and a weathering copper dwelling in Toronto by Francois Abbott.
The photography is by Rafael Gamo.
Project credits:
Design: Danielle Kemble, Sevki Topcu
Structural Engineering: Onur Can
Construction: JMOC Builders
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