The 'Encanto' school of family-first architecture

The Casita in the beloved Disney movie shows how buildings can foster community

Credit: Disney

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In my last post, I discussed helicopter parenting and the non-issue of parking lot child abductions. Then in the comments, a brief discussion zeroed in on the intersection of families and urban planning. One of the comments suggested I write more about that intersection.

I aim to please, and so I’m currently working on a few different pieces about these topics. And today, I want to focus specifically on architecture and something that I’ve been meaning to write about for years now: The house from the Disney movie Encanto. The house is a delight, but it also offers a case study in the ways that architecture can foster a multigenerational family-village. None of us are going to replicate the exact home from Encanto¹, but the lessons it offers can still provide inspiration as we look for housing that fosters community rather than isolation.

Encanto came out in 2021 and I suspect most people reading this blog have now seen it, so I’ll keep the recap short. The story follows the Madrigal family who live in Colombia. They fled violence in their village and along the way a magical candle created a house for them. That information is told via flashback, but the “present” in the movie follows the family’s third generation, with Abuela Madrigal — the woman who initially fled the violence — now the elderly matriarch of a growing clan.

The protagonist of the film is teenage Mirabel, who lacks magical powers. And like Coco (another favorite animated movie) Encanto explores themes of familial obligation and the burdens of belonging to a dynastic tribe.

But more than most movies, the Madrigals’ traditional Colombian house plays a huge role in the film. That’s partly because it’s a magical and sentient character that actively helps the family. But even without its powers, the home offers clues about how to do intergenerational living right.

For starters, and most obviously, the home isn’t a single family residence. Instead, it houses all three generations of the Madrigal family. Part of Encanto’s plot has to do with family members getting their own magical rooms, but even if those rooms weren’t magical the concept would still work; every person who comes of age has distinct and roughly equal personal space. And by equal I mean that the characters all see the house as their own; no one is, for instance, merely crashing at their parents’ home.

It’s tempting, then, to think of the Encanto home as really just an apartment building that happens to house members of a single family. But that’s not really what’s going on. Though the different family members have individual spaces, the house also forces interactions via shared common areas. There is, for example, only one kitchen. The family is shown dining in several different parts of the property, but all of those areas are shared rather than exclusive to any one person’s room or apartment. And my personal favorite part of the house is the central courtyard, which serves as the Madrigal’s main hosting and party location².

Significantly, the movie’s denouement also involves the family coming together to rebuild the house, which was destroyed in the third act. It’s a powerful message about the importance of place to family identity and cohesion.

It’s easy to gloss over all of this because after all Encanto is an animated movie for kids. But the house is actually a radical departure from what most homes in the U.S. look like. Where I live, the vast majority of homes are designed just for one nuclear family unit. They can accommodate multiple generations, and many families do indeed live cross-generationally under one roof. But most homes are not designed for that use. They’ll have, for instance, one master suite with an attached bathroom and walk-in closet, plus several smaller and simpler bedrooms. That means if grandma and grandpa move into the guest bedroom, or your adult son comes back after college, someone gets the good room and someone doesn’t. In instances of cross-generational living in a single family home, someone is typical living in another person’s house. It’s consequently no wonder that many people who can avoid this living arrangement do, and that adult kids are living with their parents is often looked down on. The architecture of the home implies that those kids are second-class occupants.

In recent years, the housing industry has worked to correct this problem by building houses with secondary living spaces, typically called mother-in-law apartments or accessory dwelling units (ADUs). These units — often in a finished basement, backyard cottage, or over-the-garage apartment — typically have their own kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms, and they’re a great solution to housing scarcity in high-demand cities. Let’s build more ADUs.

But also, the Encanto house is not one primary residence belonging to Abuela Madrigal with a bunch of little ADUs for the subsequent generations. The common areas of the Encanto house — basically the whole first floor of the building — are entirely unlike an ADU because they’re shared. Anyone who wants to eat a meal must visit the common kitchen. Anyone who wants to come or go has to traverse the shared courtyard. Where an ADU is designed to enable independent living, the Encanto architecture forces people into a community via repetitive and unplanned interactions.

That’s not to knock ADUs. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a house in the U.S. with this particular set of features: Roughly equal living spaces that can accommodate multiple generations without those generations feeling like they’re long-term guests; and common areas that everyone must regularly use. I have seen houses like this in Latin America, southern Europe and Morocco, which makes sense because Encanto is set in a country that traces its cultural lineage back to the Iberian Peninsula among other places. But for reasons I’ve never fully understood, this architectural style has not caught on in the Anglophone world³.

In any case, the things I love about the Encanto house go even deeper. For instance, if we think of architecture as a text with a built-in thesis (sorry, I was an English major), it’s significant that the main courtyard is located in the central core of the building. The implication of that architectural choice is that the family, tribe, or community is central and of paramount importance. On the other hand individual rooms, and by extension individual people, merely orbit the group. Village first, individuals second.

In other words, the arrangement of rooms in a building implies a hierarchy of values. This is true for every building, and I think many American homes either make very muddled statements, or tend to reflect American individualism. But the Encanto house is instead a physical (or, physical within the animated world) treatise on the value of community.

For a lot of reasons, none of us are likely to build the Encanto house. For one thing, it’s huge and would be very expensive to replicate. Also, it would probably be illegal, or at least very difficult to get approved, in most American cities. I don’t want to get into the regulatory weeds, but many cities’ zoning rules make it nearly impossible to build anything other than the standard single family residence. Just legalizing ADUs in more cities has been a multi-decade struggle, and ADUs are really just a small stepping stone on the path to better and more diverse housing types.

So, I’d like to see building regulations evolve to allow more diverse housing types. A good start would be to loosen single family zoning rules so that people can try more experimental forms of housing in existing, desirable neighborhoods. At the same time, the financial apparatuses that make home-building possible need to change as well so that every developer isn’t forced into constructing either single family homes or 5-over-1 mega apartments. The ultimate policy goal is to both make more experimental housing legal, and also to help it pencil in financially.

But policy aside, whether we’re actually building something like the Encanto house or not, the lesson is that architectural choices matter. Buildings can either foster community, or they can increase isolation. And so it’s possible to consider the message of buildings, their arguments if you will, and what they mean for our villages. Whether we’re building a dream home or just looking for a place to rent, I at least hope to live in a space that better connects me to the people I love.

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1. This is not a review of Encanto, but I’ll say that when I initially saw the movie I was kind of on the fence. But it’s gradually grown on me and become one of my favorite recent Disney movies. I don’t think the story is perfect, but I love the setting and themes that it’s tackling.

2. From what I could tell, the home also appears to place generally public spaces on the ground floor, with private spaces on the upper floors. That’s not just a feature of traditional Colombian homes; it’s also a tradition that dates back to ancient Rome, among other places. The HBO show Rome actually shows this type of home, and it’s remarkable how similar it is to the Encanto house.

3. I’ve experienced two things in the English-speaking world that resemble the Encanto house. Youth hostels and medieval castles. In some cases, such as St. Briavels Castle near Tinturn Abbey, they’re one and the same. And it strikes me as significant that a castle is basically the same thing as the Encanto house: a large family dwelling with a central courtyard.