Universal Design: Why Americans Need Home Design That Welcomes Everyone | Architectural Digest

Twenty years ago, Rosemarie Peretti ran a small publishing business with her husband, Mark Leder, in the basement of their two-story home in Columbus, Ohio, and spent weekends hiking and playing sports. But her life changed on an afternoon bicycle ride in 1998, when a three-and-a-half-ton tree collapsed and crashed down on her, a devastating accident that injured her spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down.

Photo by Scott Cunningham/Courtesy of the Universal Design Living Laboratory

As she healed and returned home, rehabilitation was a transformational experience that required new ways of eating and cooking, grooming, sitting up, and moving around. “Fifty percent of my home became inaccessible,” she recalls. “I couldn’t get through doorways that were too narrow for a wheelchair. I couldn’t get around furniture. I couldn’t get a glass of water because I couldn’t reach the glasses—I couldn’t even reach the sink.”

Tedious, everyday tasks became insurmountable obstacles, heightening Rossetti’s sensitivity to the design of previously overlooked details that now stood in her way. Smaller spaces such as the laundry room were too tight to for her maneuver her wheelchair; and the thick, heavy carpeting that once felt plush underfoot became a burden to roll over. Her basement office, with its various oversize printing equipment and files, became physically inaccessible, leading to the halt and eventual dissolution of her company. It was painfully clear that Rossetti’s home would no longer suit her lifestyle.

“That was the turning point; I was lucky to be alive, and refocused everything about my life and business,” she says. When a search of local properties failed to turn up one-story ranch-style homes that could ease daily demands, or at least be easily renovated to accommodate them, she and her husband put grist to mill, channeling their frustrations into research. They set out to create their own custom home from scratch—a place they could comfortably inhabit for years to come. And, with an entrepreneurial spirit, they resolved to make it a national demonstration home that could also serve a wider public mission.

Enlisting local architect Patrick Manley to create their ideal plan, the couple delved into the resources at Mobile, Columbus’s independent-living center. “Just reading up on accessible homes, on how big a bathroom needed to be, how to install grab bars, I was like a sponge, ready to learn,” Rossetti recalls. Discovering resources and literature about Universal Design—an approach that calls for products and environments to be equitable and accessible to all, regardless of age, size, or ability—was both a godsend and a relief. “It gave us hope to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, people have thought this through.‘”

Working with more than 200 product sponsors, vendors, consultants, and thousands of volunteers over the course of several years, the couple completed and opened the doors to the state-of-the-art, LEED Silver-certified Universal Design Living Laboratory (UDLL) in 2014, and have since happily lived in a space that’s both suitable for Leder, who stands six feet, four inches tall, and Rossetti, seated at four feet, two inches.

Visitors, welcome to tour the premises by appointment, come and leave “in absolute awe,” she says, impressed with the range of products, fixtures, and details they hadn’t even known were on the market. Doorways measure 36 inches wide, rather than the standard 28; cabinets and countertops are tiered to accommodate more than one height; and showers are spacious and curbless, with drains that run flush to the surface. Being a living resource for knowledge exchange is the UDLL’s core mission, as is demystifying any misconceptions. “Universal Design is for everyone, not just for those in wheelchairs, first of all,” says Rossetti, “and when people visit the home, they understand that Universal Design need not look institutional.”

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