The Levee, an Innovative Multifamily Design Coming Soon to Memphis, TN | Shapiro & Company Architects
The apartment garage has long been treated as infrastructure, but The Levee apartments opts to change that thinking. The 300-unit residential community breaking ground in the upcoming months was designed to create units that feel more home-like than what's typically on the market in the Memphis area, and part of that vision was making private garages with direct-to-unit access the standard.
Why Renters Want This, and Why It Matters
Renters increasingly expect more than square footage and finishes. Convenience and privacy in daily routines matter, too, especially as renters looking for longer-term options increases.
Most multifamily products don’t offer that attention to life patterns. Garage access in apartment communities is typically shared: a communal structure, a walk to the unit, doors and corridors in between. It works, but it doesn't make a unit feel like home.
This innovative design approach is a direct response to what renters are asking for: an apartment that functions like a home, garage included.
Units with direct garage access typically command higher rents and see stronger retention, which shows residents notice and value the difference. For the development team, that's a measurable business case. For our design team, it’s a case for the value of experienced designers that how a corridor is laid out, where a garage door sits, and the small daily frictions that separate an apartment from a home create significant value for developers looking to secure a longer stake in the market.
The Design Challenge
Giving residents a private, single-door path from garage to apartment is a challenge when multifamily design doesn’t typically accommodate that layout.
The typical approach lines a corridor with individual garage doors, one per unit. That layout cuts into unit efficiency, complicates structural and life-safety systems, and usually only works for a small handful of units before those issues compound. It also cuts away from the home-like feel these developers envisions, and tends to feel more like a parking structure than a garage that belongs to a home.
The mix of studios, one-, two-, and three-bedroom units across The Levee's 10 residential buildings added another layer of complexity: each unit type comes with different structural and spatial constraints, and the direct-to-garage unit mix had to fit in with the overall unit mix efficiently.
The Multifamily Studio at Shapiro & Company Architects worked through numerous design iterations to create a solution at scale. The result: 37% of the community's units open directly to a garage, which includes nearly every ground-floor unit and a portion of the second.
A Model for What's Next
The Levee points to where multifamily design is headed in the Memphis area and beyond: apartments that borrow more from single-family living without giving up the efficiencies that make multifamily work. As renter expectations keep shifting, the communities that stand out won't just be the ones with the longest amenity list, but the ones that acknowledge the details that renters value most.
View the full project gallery of The Levee here.
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