Laura Montllor, AIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Laura Montllor, AIA, is a principal of Montllor Box Architects in Port Washington, N.Y., and executive director of Home Free Home (HFH), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to providing pro bono architectural design services to people who need to remodel their homes to accommodate a disability. Montllor also is a member of the Small Project Practitioners Knowledge Community Advisory Group.

Education
BArch from Carnegie Mellon University

Professional background
I started in private practice in 1987. My husband also works with me, and right now we have two-and-a-half people [in the firm]. We do exclusively residential renovations.

Favorite place
It would be Segovia, Spain. Architecturally, that’s my favorite place. It has a lot of Romanesque architecture.

Currently reading
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It’s a very interesting book. I really enjoyed it and bought a couple copies, and now am handing it out to people. There’s also a book by Geography of Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler called World Made by Hand. It’s a futuristic dystopia novel, but it has a lot to do with place and technology. It’s a bizarre book, but the ideas are interesting.

The beginning of Home Free Home
It started from a conversation about three years ago that I was having with a woman architect I went to college with. We were discussing where our careers had gone in the last 30 years. We both felt that we started out with very altruistic goals and, although we have had interesting careers—hers is quite different than mine; she works at SOM—we both thought we should try to do something different to fill the needs of real people living in real houses.

My firm is about 2.5 people, so we are the average-sized architecture office in the U.S. Most small firms occasionally get asked to do pro bono work. I’ve been in practice for 20 years and during that time, three or four people have asked me to work for free remodeling a house so that people could have accessibility. One project I did quite a few years ago was for a young man who had been in a car accident just after he and his wife had a baby—he was very suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. They had just bought a house and it was completely inaccessible, like most houses in the U.S. and certainly most houses in our area on Long Island. They’re older homes and usually have two, three, or four steps before you can even get into the house.

A small office is not like a law firm with 200 people, where you can take the pro bono work and hand it off to somebody else. Because most practices are very small, the pro bono work really does become a financial burden on the office. HFH is trying to streamline that entire experience so the architect can actually spend volunteer time doing the design work. The organization will be doing all of the other parts of the process. We’re centralizing and integrating what already exists in a scattered way.

Through the Web site, disabled clients will be matched up with local volunteer teams of architects and university students. They then meet with the client, create the schematic design and do the construction drawings for small-scale projects, which are what we’re going to focus on things like ramps, accessible bathrooms, and accessible kitchens. The intention of the organization isn’t to go in and design brand new houses for people. It really is about residential renovation for accessibility and HFH is an all-volunteer organization.

Funding the projects
There is federal and state funding out there for people who are truly financially needy. It’s not enough, but I think HFH will be able to help with that a great deal because we’re providing the architectural services and getting them to the point where they have a building permit. HFH is going to be able to carry clients through to that point and then refer them to the right public agencies and help them apply for this money. I think this is another very important part of the service.

For others who don’t qualify for funding assistance, HFH will act as a referral service. We’ll give construction costs to people who fall in the mid-range and ask how much they can put in. Then, HFH will go with our drawings and meet with these people at their local level with their churches, synagogues, Lions Club, or whatever else and help the local community raise the rest of the money. People will get inspired when they actually see the real drawings. That’s what I see the majority of our work doing, assisting this majority of middle class people who have no help.

The pilot project
We’re starting our first pilot project this summer. We’re building a ramp for a little girl who has spina bifida. She’s four years old and is in a special school. They’re teaching her how to use her wheelchair and her walker and the toilet, which she hasn’t been able to do. She then gets home and can’t even get onto the toilet. She can’t reinforce what she’s learning at school. We’re starting with the ramp. I don’t think we’re going to be able to do the bathroom this summer. This is the first time I’ve actually done this type of nonprofit organization thing. It takes much longer than you think it will, but the ramp will be done this summer.

A growing need
As soon as I put the Web site up, I got inquiries from all over the country. It was amazing. I hadn’t done anything else. We hadn’t done any marketing, so the need is tremendous. The U.S. Census says that there are 11.5 million Americans who have physical disabilities that make going outside of their home difficult or impossible. And that statistic is constantly growing because we have an aging population. Most people live in a conventionally designed house where there are things that impede even the simplest daily living functions. For those living with disability, it only compounds their hardship. The house is working against them.

We’ve had a couple of articles in Newsday, and from that we’ve also had a tremendous instantaneous response. We had one tiny article (about 1/16th of a page), and some 120 people responded, asking for work to be done on their houses. More than 100 people called because there are so many people who are living in situations in which a simple thing of redesigning the bathroom—taking out the tub, and putting in a roll-in shower—would change their lives completely.

How many volunteer architects are already helping?
Right now we have about 40 people, and we’re working on six other new jobs, which, as far as drawings and everything, I think will be done by the end of the year.

Benefit of HFH for architects
Besides doing a good altruistic thing, it is going to make the entire process easier for architects. When someone calls you requesting pro bono accessibility work, but you’re too busy to take it on, instead of turning someone down you can send them to the HFH Web site. The other benefit is that when you volunteer for HFH, you can choose what type of project you want to take on and when, or choose the level of difficulty of the project that you want. The third advantage for the architect is that HFH will do all of the publicity. The Web site is going to be stepped up a couple of notches, so that there will be individual project pages with architect information. HFH also will be taking care of contacting local media, so that the architect volunteer doesn’t have to do any of that. Maximizing the architect’s effort is what it comes down to.

I don’t think architects need a lot of encouragement to do this, because I think architects are basically altruistic people. They just need to understand that this is going to make it easy for them to do pro bono work and that they’re not getting involved in volunteering for a huge, unlimited time effort project.