Making 2020 Holiday Huts

The Town of Hanover, New Hampshire, wanted to find a way to create activity downtown during the cold holiday season, so they crafted the idea of a Festival of Lights.

The intention was to create a level of interest that would bring area residents into downtown during the winter holiday season to support local businesses that have suffered since the beginning of the pandemic, especially now that the weather has eliminated the possibility of outdoor dining.

One of the specific initiatives the town came up with was to construct Holiday Huts, reminiscent of the kiosks that you would see in a European holiday market.  

This idea took shape only two and half weeks before the traditional lighting of the Christmas Tree on the Green (first Friday in December), so the town had to scramble all available resources to make the Festival of Lights happen.

Hanover reached out to MA+KE Architects to see if we would be willing to design a prototype, pro bono, for Holiday Huts that could be constructed by local construction companies in time for the kickoff on the first Friday of December. The program for the Holiday Huts included a general footprint of 35 to 50 square feet, a counter for customers to pick up food orders, and ability to be constructed in a way so that it could be easily disassembled, stored flat and reassembled every year.

MA+KE was excited to be asked to participate and we developed a design in two days. We then coordinated with a local builder, Domus Construction, to refine it so it could be built in less than a week. Trumbull-Nelson also volunteered to construct a Holiday Hut based on our original design. They pulled their version together in two days.

The two MA+KE Holiday Hut designs were modified during construction in order to reduce the overall weight and to simplify a few details due to the compressed time frame.  

Domus and Trumbull-Nelson Construction each delivered versions of the MA+KE Holiday Huts and, given the lack of time for true design development, we were thrilled to see what they produced. Now, we at MA+KE are discussing with Hanover how to take the lessons learned in this extremely rushed exercise and finalize a design that can be constructed over the course of the next year and take the 2nd Annual Festival of Lights to a higher level.