Archinect - Sense of Space

A Tudor on the "Yellow Brick Road"

2013-04-11T15:12:57-04:00

This is a project that I've worked on for almost two years — a major renovation of a 6-storey Tudor style house built in the 1920's. When my clients bought this house, about a half of it was uninhabitable, with unused storage rooms, 1970's fake wood paneling and broken windows. The house had a good "bone structure" but was very poorly planned and unattended to for many years. My clients wanted to make their home bright and airy, and to take advantage of the fantastic views overlooking the town from a cliff-side.

We came up with a game plan where we would concentrate on completing the upper three floors (what you see in the pictures below, a view from the street) first so the family could move in, then isolate the bottom levels and build those out. First, the new central A/C system had to be put in, which became a challenge because all exterior walls and the majority of interior partitions are hollow cement block.

It was peculiar that there was no outside access from the s...

A cedar house transformation

2013-04-09T19:15:32-04:00

There was this house that knew better days...

In it lives a very large family that was lacking basic amenities, like having a place to sit down and have a meal together (of course they had a dining room but this isn't Downton Abbey!). They got in touch with me to suggest some layouts for a larger kitchen, which would involve building an addition.

What started out as a "kitchen project" grew into almost an entire house renovation — from building two new additions to reinforcing the structure, to recladding the exterior with new cedar shingles, not to mention numerous interior changes.

We replanned the entire first floor, expanding the kitchen, adding a large breakfast area and a small office off of the dining room.

This is what the floor plan looked like originally:

This is what we did in the end:

We started out with taking out about half of the first floor, the old second floor deck, and all of the exterior finishes. Once the demolition was done, the new work...