When dreamers wield hammers

By day, Lorenzo Mattii works in the Somerville office of global architect Moshe Safdie. Paul Gross works at the Boston firm CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares, helping execute British architect Norman Foster's grandiose plan to transform the Museum of Fine Arts.

But after-hours the pair spend a great deal of time on Marcella Street in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury, where they and partners have already bought one town house and are negotiating to buy the adjacent one and several others, with plans to renovate and sell them for a profit.

Architects, at least in the popular imagination, are black-sweater dreamers with funny glasses who are blissfully oblivious to the intricacies of real estate markets and finance. Their work, however, is often reduced to a daily grind of long hours, low wages, and endless computer drafting, with market forces and developers making the final call on how things look.

That's beginning to change. Lured by the red-hot real estate market, more and more architects are becoming moonlight redevelopers, spending their off-hours doing hard labor or overseeing work on-site.

''Architects are trained in the studio system, where they make things and take risks, and then step back and pull it all apart and do it another way," said Dennis Frenchman, a professor at the MIT Center for Real Estate. ''So there's a lot of common ground with real estate. We're beginning to see the developer less as the consumer of architecture than as the maker of architecture, orchestrating the whole process."

And so architects are trying to outsmart developers in the market.

Gesturing widely in front of his dilapidated Victorian row house, Mattii is nothing but enthusiastic about its potential for transformation. Modern glass bridges, purposefully meant to contrast with the traditional red-brick architecture, would connect the back of the town houses to the outcroppings of Roxbury puddingstone that rise at the rear. ''The morning sun rises here, so I see a Japanese rock garden, which doesn't require much light," Mattii said.

Ever the architect as idealist, Gross said he envisioned a public stair that would link Marcella Street to Highland Park, which spreads out from the top of the rocks. ''It would really be to our benefit to add to the civic presence of the street," he said. ''When you're your own client, you can introduce something into the program that a developer can't."

And yet vision has its price. Mattii estimates that glass bridges and Japanese gardens mean pouring about $200,000 into each town house -- roughly what they paid for the first one in its fixer-upper shape.

''I have no problem speaking negatively about developers," Mattii said. ''All they talk about is granite countertops. They know what will bring them money, so they all do the same thing. My strategy is, by bringing in this added value of design, you can beat the builder at his own game."