On June 10, 2026, at the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design Awards Gala in San Diego, a Bozeman firm stepped onto one of the biggest stages in American architecture. Studio Cohab — founded right here in Montana in 2019 — received the 2026 AIA Housing Award in the Community-Engaged Design category for their project Bozeman Cohousing. It is the first time in the Housing Award program’s history that a Montana-based firm has taken home the honor, and the first time in 20 years that any Montana project has won at the national level.
The AIA Housing Award is widely regarded as the highest distinction in American residential architecture. Winners are evaluated against the AIA Framework for Design Excellence and judged on whether their projects are sustainable, affordable, durable, innovative, socially impactful, and beautiful. The competition is national and the field is formidable. Studio Cohab won it with a 43-home net-zero energy neighborhood built on 5.3 acres in south Bozeman — designed not by outside experts, but by the very people who would live there.
What Is the AIA Housing Award — and Why Does This Win Matter?
The American Institute of Architects has recognized excellence in residential design since 1956. The Housing Award, presented annually, spans five categories covering the full spectrum of housing types — from single-family homes to large-scale multifamily developments. The Community-Engaged Design category, which Studio Cohab won, is among the newest and in many ways the most demanding. It requires that design excellence be demonstrated not just in the finished building, but in the process itself — how communities were involved, how values were translated into structure, and how architecture served people before a single wall was framed.
To put this win in context: the last Montanan project to win the national Housing Award was Avis Ranch in Clyde Park in 2006 — a custom single-family residence designed by a California firm. Bozeman Cohousing is the first Montana project to win since, and the first time a firm with roots in this state has claimed the honor. For a profession where the coasts have long dominated the conversation, a Bozeman firm winning in a category that asks architects to solve housing’s hardest problems is a meaningful signal.
Studio Cohab was founded in 2019 by architect Erik Bonnett, AIA, and designer Mathilde Berthe. The firm launched with a single project — Bozeman Cohousing — and has since grown into one of North America’s recognized specialists in cohousing and community-centered design.
Their focus has never wavered from a core conviction: that housing is a fundamental human right, that strong communities are essential to human happiness, and that inspired design has the power to unlock opportunity. Every project, in their framing, is not just a development — it is a chance to drive change. Bozeman Cohousing is where that philosophy was first put to the test, at full scale, in one of the West’s most challenging housing markets.
A Community That Designed Itself
Cohousing originated in Denmark in the 1960s as a response to a striking observation that the way most housing is designed produces isolation rather than connection. Private homes, private yards, private lives. Cohousing offers an alternative. Residents own their individual homes with full privacy and autonomy, but the neighborhood is intentionally designed around shared life using common spaces, shared meals, communal outdoor areas, shared common resources, and, critically, a design process in which future residents participate from the start.
Studio Cohab facilitated a participatory, consensus-based workshop process with Bozeman Cohousing’s founding members from the project’s earliest stages. The firm helped the group work through every aspect of the community together — translating a diverse set of values into a coherent physical design. As Erik Bonnett has described it: “Bozeman Cohousing is a tactile example of how inspired design can confront the environmental and housing-affordability issues of the West.” That integration between process and place is precisely what the Community-Engaged Design category was created to recognize — and for the first time since the category was established four years ago, the AIA jury found a project they believed worthy of the award.
Affordability as Architecture: A New Model for the Mountain West
Bozeman is no longer the affordable small city it once was. Median home prices in the greater Bozeman area exceeded $700,000 in early 2026, and Gallatin County’s Housing Affordability Index has dropped sharply over the last decade as the region became one of the fastest-growing in the nation. The affordability crisis isn’t unique to Bozeman — it’s reshaping mountain towns across Montana and the wider West, pushing out the teachers, healthcare workers, and longtime residents who make these communities what they are.
Bozeman Cohousing proposes a structural answer. Studio Cohab’s approach was to use the economics of shared living to deliver homes at price points the traditional housing market cannot match. The studio units at Bozeman Cohousing, when they sold, were among the most affordable market-rate housing in the city — achieved through spatial efficiency and the inherent cost advantages of cohousing as a model.
Think of it this way: a cohousing community of 42 households can collectively own a woodshop, a guest suite, a flock of chickens, even a herd of goats. What is out of reach for any individual middle-class family becomes accessible when divided across a community. The same logic applies to maintenance — one person weeds, another mows, someone else gardens, and the collective result is something incomparably more than any household could maintain alone. That’s 5.3 acres of shared green space that no individual family could afford, cared for by neighbors who chose each other.
The community went further. During the participatory design process, the founding members collectively decided to fund two permanently affordable homes within the project — subsidized voluntarily by future residents and matched by developer and city funding. They chose to create affordability for neighbors they hadn’t yet met. That decision, made in a design workshop before construction began, is a remarkable illustration of what community-engaged design makes possible.
Net-Zero Energy in a Frigid Climate: A National First
Bozeman Cohousing is the first net-zero energy cohousing community in the United States. That distinction, achieved at market-rate price points in a cold climate, is more than a milestone — it’s a proof of concept for a region that has often looked to the coasts or Europe for sustainability models.
The project achieves net-zero performance through a combination of super-insulated building envelopes, airtight construction, high-efficiency heat pumps, and rooftop solar panels. The community generates as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year. That’s not a niche outcome produced by unusual budgets or experimental technology — it was achieved with standard construction methods in one of Montana’s fastest-growing neighborhoods, at prices designed for middle-class buyers.
Sustainability was never an afterthought. It was central to the residents’ values from the first workshop. The cohousing model amplified that goal — when a community shares heating systems, optimizes building orientation collectively, and makes energy efficiency decisions together, the results exceed what any individual homeowner could achieve on their own.
Why This Win Matters Beyond Bozeman
The pressures that shaped Bozeman Cohousing are not local. Affordability, density, ecological sustainability, and social isolation are the defining challenges of mountain communities across the American West right now. What Studio Cohab has done — and what the AIA has recognized — is demonstrate that architecture rooted in the specific pressures of a place, designed by the people who will live there, can produce results that stand up against the very best housing design in the nation.
Montana has traditionally looked elsewhere for models. The coasts have the design firms, the budgets, and the media attention. Bozeman Cohousing flips that script. A small firm founded in Bozeman, working in one of the country’s most challenging housing markets, just won the most prestigious housing design award in America in the category that arguably matters most right now: community-engaged design. That’s worth paying attention to — not just as local pride, but as a signal about where the best thinking on housing is actually happening.
About Studio Cohab
Studio Cohab is a full-service architecture firm specializing in cohousing, affordable housing, and mission-driven design. Founded in 2019 by Erik Bonnett, AIA, and Mathilde Berthe, the firm is headquartered at 914 West Babcock Street in Bozeman. Since launching with Bozeman Cohousing, the firm has taken on community-centered projects across North America. Learn more at cohabdesign.com.
About the AIA Housing Award
The AIA Housing Award, presented by the American Institute of Architects, recognizes the best in home and housing design across five categories, evaluated against the AIA Framework for Design Excellence. The 2026 winners were announced at the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design Awards Gala in San Diego on June 10, 2026.
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All photographs courtesy of Whitney Kamman Photography / Studio Cohab
