Living above the store? Works for them

Donna and Lizza Robb did the math: Take a 12-hour workday for Donna, owner/chef of Mount Airy's Cresheim Cottage Cafe. Add a twice-daily commute from their home in West Philadelphia. Subtract the mortgage on their six-bedroom house from the restaurant's profits. Count the number of times Donna was able to say goodnight to their 41/2-year-old daughter, Spencer.

The bottom line was clear: A year ago, they sold their house, lent Lizza's great-grandparents' oak dining table to friends, and moved into a snug four-room apartment over the restaurant on Germantown Avenue.

Now, Donna Robb can slip downstairs in her pajamas, before the restaurant opens, to repair a butcher-paper bracket in the kitchen. Spencer can flit through the dining room, delaying bedtime by saying goodnight to all the customers. And Lizza, a graphic designer who works from home, can find the ideal balance between solitude and company.

"We were intimidated by moving into such a small space," Lizza, 31, says after a quick tour of the family's living quarters: sitting room, master bedroom, Spencer's room (with the former wine closet converted to a sleeping nook), a tiny office and tinier kitchenette (previously a servers' station).

"Then we found we were actually small-space people, and we loved it. Also, Mount Airy was a great compromise between the city and outdoors. We knew this could be home."

More than 20 million Americans work at home, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics count in 2004. But no one is tracking the inverse: people like the Robbs who live where they work - in the flat above the cafe, the studio behind the gallery, or the top floors of a rowhouse with a street-level shop.

It's an old practice that has resurfaced as part of the New Urbanism, a city-planning approach whose buzzwords include livability, community and conservation.

"If you were to trace the history of Philadelphia and other great cities all over the world, there are many examples of this mixed-use development; merchants were encouraged to set up shop on the ground floor and live above their stores," says Senen Antonio, director of business development for DPZ, a Miami-based planning firm that has built and redeveloped more than 300 communities in the United States and around the world.

These days, there are new reasons to return to that way of life: rising gas prices; grueling commutes; a concern for the environment and for work-life balance. Living over the store is the antithesis of globalization: In a world where owners, workers and consumers are often continents apart, business doesn't get any more local than this.

It's a practice that changes neighborhoods - and maybe even the Earth - for the better, says Leanne Krueger-Braneky, executive director of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia. People who don't commute use less gas. They may be able to conserve other resources by living and working on the same property.

"It means something to know that [a business owner] is part of the community," Krueger-Braneky says, "not to mention the fact that the money they're making is recirculating in that very neighborhood."

Heather Bryson, a jeweler and artist who works in metal and wood, made a space in the 600 block of South Ninth Street her home in 1996 - a compact studio and workshop behind a dingy former appliance store. In 2000, she renovated the high-ceilinged storefront and opened B Square Gallery to showcase her work and that of her artist-friends.

"For me, working is playing. Now, I wake up every single day on my own schedule and create art," Bryson says.

And if the line between work and home sometimes blurs - with silk paintings drying on the apartment floor and sawdust sifting in from the workshop - Bryson, 36, embraces it as an emblem of her happily integrated life.

"Because I live here, I can say [to a customer], 'If you need your jewelry polished, and you're going out for dinner in Center City, you can drop it off and I'll clean it.' I've had credit-card sales at midnight from friends who've come by."

When she only lived on South Ninth Street, Bryson knew few of her neighbors. Now that she's a business owner with a visible storefront, she has met many more, including one neighbor who cares for the gallery when Bryson travels.

Daniel Monti, a sociologist at Boston University and author of The American City: A Social and Cultural History, says that kind of connection is good news. "Living above where you work makes sense. It's economical, it's efficient. And it represents an even firmer commitment to the neighborhoods in which these people both live and work."

At first, Lizza and Donna Robb worried about raising their daughter above the cafe. What 4-year-old gets to select her dinner - grilled duck confit pizza, Atlantic salmon with a spinach-risotto croquette - from a restaurant menu five nights a week?

Would Spencer learn to play quietly when customers were downstairs? ("She does all her tap-dancing on Mondays," when the restaurant is closed, Lizza says.)

What would happen when she played "making margaritas" in the preschool sandbox? (Her teacher had a good chuckle.)

But the couple found that living above the restaurant conferred rewards they didn't envision: the way restaurant employees have become their extended family; the fact that their home, business, church, school and favorite dine-out spot (Hokka Hokka in Chestnut Hill) are all in the same neighborhood.

"Donna's up and down all day; I see her so much more," Lizza says. "Sometimes, we think about buying a house. But we're happy here for now."

City and state planners here endorse mixed-use development, where residences rub elbows with retail shops and offices. Pennsylvania even has a state loan program, the Mixed Use Facility Financing Initiative, to support the rehab of apartments over storefronts in commercial corridors.

That's a scenario Len Jenkins knows well. When he fled his family's nest at age 18, he packed a futon, a hammock, a stereo and a rolltop desk that had belonged to his great-great-grandfather, and ventured far, far away from his parents' Wynnewood home - to an apartment above their store, the Rosin Box on Sansom Street.

The store has since moved to a different Sansom Street location, and Jenkins moved along with it, now living with his wife, Kimberly, and three sons on the second and third floors, above the dancewear boutique with the streaked red ballet shoes in the window.

He used to sell leotards and pointe shoes while carrying his youngest son, Luke, in a Snugli. As toddlers, the boys played on the shop's floor. These days, Lee, 15, works in the store on Saturdays, and Luke, 8, can't wait to start.

"The most wonderful aspect of having the shop was not needing day care," Jenkins says.

Now that the boys are older, Jenkins can supervise their homework. In between customers, he might dash upstairs to start a pot of potato soup or spaghetti gravy for dinner. He's developed a "magic plate" ritual with the owners of Porcini restaurant next door; the men pass a serving dish back and forth, trying to outdo one another with platters of eggplant parmigiana or bruschetta.

There are downsides to living and working in a 19th-century brick rowhouse: no backyard (though there's always Rittenhouse Square). No escaping the business phone (Jenkins can't help taking calls after hours). No roughhousing upstairs on Saturdays, the shop's busiest day.

But at the end of that day, or any day, Jenkins closes the last sale, turns off the lights in the Rosin Box, walks up one flight of narrow stairs - toward the smell of soup and the laughter of his kids - and knows he's home.