Pro-File Design: Mowery Marsh Architects

When clients hire Mowery Marsh Architects, they deal exclusively with Jennifer Mowery Marsh, AIA, and Brian Marsh, AIA. The husband-and-wife team, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, work on all their projects without the help of staff or interns. “It’s just the two of us, and from the beginning, we’re thinking about every aspect of the project and the budget. Our projects are very cohesive, from energy efficiency to the paint colors of the powder room,” says Jennifer. 

Like Kendall Roy’s cashmere baseball cap, these homes are quietly luxurious. The firm takes on two to four new clients a year and works on 10 to 12 projects at a time; the typical project is 4,000 square feet, with a budget of $2 million and up. Half are gut renovations, and half are new builds upstate. But all are designed to meet Passive House requirements, the gold standard for energy-efficient construction, in which homes are tightly sealed and heavily insulated. After renovating dozens of brownstones, Jennifer and Brian have become skilled at re-creating period charm while incorporating modern functionality within a limited footprint. “A lot of times people think we restore buildings, because they look period,” says Jennifer. Even their new builds are also grounded in spatial efficiency of the past. “Because we’ve done so many renovations, when we do a new build, we’re always thinking of the scale and sensibilities of townhouses,” says Jennifer. “They feel really nice, are easy to furnish, and are at the scale of people. We’ll put the size of stair that we use in a townhome to infuse that charm into a new build.” 

Both principals are personal fans of city living, after growing up in relatively isolated, car-intensive settings—Brian in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware; Jennifer in rural Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Jennifer’s mother was interested in art and fashion and owned a bridal store. Jennifer’s father sold concrete and built the family house, a brick Cape Cod. “Quality construction was very important to him. He would talk about spalling concrete and why it would fail,” recalls Jennifer. Brian’s father had an entrepreneurial spirit. After working at a bank for many years, he turned his hobby of stamp collecting into a successful business. “That gave me the confidence that I could run a business too,” says Brian. 

After discovering an early aptitude for art, they both went to Penn State to study architecture in the early 1990s. During freshman year, they got to know each other as desk partners in design studio. “We shared a 60-inch-long desk, but then Brian installed a 42-inch parallel rule, and so it began,” recalls Jennifer. The program at the large state school offered flexibility. “The nice thing about Penn State is that it allowed you to focus on whatever you wanted to focus on,” says Brian. But it also gave Jennifer a case of impostor syndrome: “My feeling was, ‘I don’t know if I’m really cut out for this,’” she says. “They kept showing us these reference images of Eisenman, Gehry—iconic designs by big male egos.”

In time, she came to realize that nobody in their class fit the stereotype. 

After graduation, Jennifer worked for a few different firms, including Davis Brody Bond, known for its civic and cultural projects. In 2004, after becoming a mother, she launched her own firm to have more flexibility. She began working on renovations for families in Hoboken and other New York City bedroom communities. “It was easy for me to connect with women who wanted to renovate their houses,” she recalls. “They appreciated that we cared about maximizing storage and making spaces that were great for families. And there weren’t many practices [in the area] that were full-service architects.” Over a decade, she grew the business slowly, to the point where she was regularly turning away new clients; Brian came on board in 2013.

Cocooning Trend

In the meantime, Brian, who was working for renowned residential architect Dennis Wedlick, FAIA, had been introduced to Passive House. When the market crashed in 2007, Wedlick took advantage of the downtime to focus on it. In 2011, the couple renovated their own Hoboken townhouse, gunning for Passive House. “Jen was like, ‘If we’re really going to make this part of our firm, we need to live it,’” says Brian, noting that Passive House renovations are a challenge distinct from new builds. “We didn’t hit the actual standard, but we understood the problems that come up, and what we had to look out for. So the next project we did, we did tremendously better.” 

After the fourth renovation, they were able to hit the actual Passive House targets; today, they work with a handful of contractors and are confident enough to work with those who haven’t built a Passive House before but are willing to try. To ensure that projects are built properly, the architects always tell contractors that they’re going for certification. “Then the builder can’t make deviations,” says Brian.  

After living in their own almost-but-not-quite Passive House for more than a decade, the two can’t say enough about the joys of living in an exceptionally quiet, clean, and comfortable environment. “We have this cocoon-like environment in the middle of this bustling city,” says Jennifer. “Having lived here for almost 30 years, we’ve come to realize that the most environmentally conscious approach to home construction is to transform existing homes into Passive Houses for the next generation.” Adds Brian, “Once you know Passive, you can’t go back to regular construction. You know all the sins that are out there and how scary it is for moisture and mold and those things.” It is an easy sell to their clients as well, he says. “We ask, ‘Do you want clean, fresh filtered air inside your house? Do you want it to be quiet?’ And they say yes.”

It’s interesting to note that, while the standard has been dinged for perceived design limitations, it has become an integral part of the Mowery Marsh aesthetic. The thickened walls—20 inches thick in new builds—are a draw for their clients. “That depth of form has become a big part of the look of our work,” notes Jennifer. “We design deep recesses for windows and large expanses of glass that are really thermally comfortable. We would feel uncomfortable doing that if you couldn’t sit by that big window in the middle of winter. That’s something you can’t show in pictures—it’s beautiful, but it also feels really amazing and not drafty.” 

Behind the Scenes

To get a better sense of the firm’s comprehensive renovations, Barrow Street Passive is a good case study. The architects counseled client Cara Murphy to buy the “worst house on the best street,” as Cara puts it, and invest money in the renovation instead. Cara found a scarily dilapidated brownstone in Jersey City, New Jersey, dating back to the 1880s. The architects did a gut renovation, replacing the floor joists and the stairs, and extended the back of the house with a three-level addition, for a total of 4,300 square feet. While building back the interiors, they designed discrete places to tuck in new mechanical systems and additional storage, using those elements to define separate rooms. “We’re shaping space into volumes,” says Jennifer. “Traditionally you would have done that, instead of blowing out the whole thing into one big room.” 

Located in a historic district, the home’s façade had to be period-appropriate. The architects found robust triple-paned tilt-turn windows that resembled single-pane double-hung ones, and detailed them accordingly. “We bury the frames into the wall behind the brick as much as possible, and work with the manufacturer to design muntin profiles that are sized and shaped like historic windows,” explains Brian. They also added streamlined crown molding and other period details to the more public spaces downstairs. “It’s a nod to a traditional home, but a more modern, clean version,” says Jennifer. “These houses aren’t very big, so keeping the details more refined makes them feel bigger.” 

Showcasing their ability to create a pitch-perfect replica of the past, Chatham Passive Homestead looks like nothing else but a vintage barn that has been adaptively reused. The 2,500-square-foot new build occupies a 150-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley. “It’s so advanced, but reminiscent of traditional architecture,” says Jennifer. The “barn” has timber beams and rafters that are partially structural, and the heavily insulated, stone-veneered walls have deep chamfered window jambs—just as if they were created by punching holes through old stone walls.

On the more contemporary side of their portfolio is Fern Hill, a 4,100-square-foot lake house in the Poconos. Inspired by the old cabin that was on the property, the house has three gables, designed to give each of the three major spaces—primary bedroom, living room, den—a lake view. There’s a covered porch which is separated from the rest of the house by a glass accordion wall, allowing the house to open up in good weather—refuting the idea that a Passive House home has to be hermetically sealed. “It actually can be quite open air,” says Jennifer.  “A lot of folks have this feeling that Passive House must be contemporary or have a certain aesthetic. And we’re like, ‘Nope, we can make any house Passive.’”