The article explores the evolution of the greenhouse from its nineteenth-century horticultural origins into a design model for contemporary collective housing. By revisiting historical precedents, the study highlights how greenhouse additions can inform contemporary design for sustainability in the context of residential design, enhancing, on the one hand, energy consumption performance, through the active participation of inhabitants in environmental control management, and fostering, on the other, a sense of community, by creating spaces which may enable social interaction and participation. While the integration of greenhouse-like structures has appeared in various individual housing projects throughout the twentieth century, this study specifically focuses on the scale of multiunit housing. Employing a qualitative, case-based methodology, the research situates these examples within broader theoretical debates on the relationship between architecture and nature, built form and interior climate, user behaviour, and the creation of social spaces. The article concludes by calling for further research into greenhouse additions and their meaning for the built environment, also through new interdisciplinary synergies.