This Napa Family’s $226K ADU Repurposes Skateboard Wheels and Vineyard Stakes

The little house with the funny angles, where the Chandlers live with their two kids and a dog, was once a garage, built in the 1950s in St. Helena, California, in what was once a walnut orchard.

In a way, the space in and around their home, a 500-square-foot, rusty-metal accessory dwelling unit (ADU), is an evolving monument to was-onces and used-to-bes. The fountain used to be planter boxes. The rain screen was once a bunch of stakes in a friend’s vineyard. And the rollers that slide open a storage space in the kitchen? The Chandlers scored those at an estate sale—they were skateboard wheels.

Ryan and Maddie Chandler are the two halves of Chandler Workshop Architects, a firm with a handful of Northern California projects to its name. In 2017, having had their fill of city living, the couple decamped from San Francisco for Ryan’s hometown of St. Helena to be closer to his family and start their firm. They wound up buying a home next to the one that he grew up in, where his mom, Mirja, still lives.