K-W Urban Native Wigwam Project and Warrior Home 2023 Design Team

Nominated for the Paul Oberman Award for Adaptive Reuse: Small-Scale/Individual/Small Business

In December 2020 K-W Urban Native Wigwam Project (KWUNWP) won the Region of Waterloo’s first lottery of surplus property. It was a dubious prize: an 1890s house, unoccupied for seven years, needing substantial repairs. But knowing it could help KWUNWP provide safe, secure, rent-geared-to-income housing for Indigenous individuals and their families with low or moderate incomes, Executive Director Lee Ann Hundt paid the Region $1 and committed to make 32 Mill Street affordable housing for at least 25 years. Hundt began costing repairs and searching for community support. In July 2021, Regional staff connected her with University of Waterloo Warrior Home students wanting to enter the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, an international competition to design and build high-performance low-carbon buildings powered by renewables. The Warrior Home team had three goals: provide high quality, low-cost Indigenous housing; reduce travel time and costs through a local project; and enter the Solar Decathlon’s first ever Retrofit Build Challenge. 32 Mill Street was a perfect match.

Warrior Home and KWUNWP overcame many interconnected challenges to create a model of long-term affordability, energy conservation and heritage conservation. The completed project shows that even modest heritage buildings can be economically retrofitted, drastically reducing operating costs and carbon emissions, and making them deeply affordable over the long term.

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