Tabla de contenidos para New Old House 2024 en Old House Journal

AT FIRST GLANCE, the home known as Brentwood Park II might be mistaken for a 1920s Norman Revival. Its form is familiar. There are steep triple gables and rooflines curve gently over twin garages left and right of the main pavilion. There’s the light-gray tone of exterior walls, and punched-up, black-steel windows, garage doors, and gates. And then there’s the serenity of the courtyard, beckoning beyond. But, no. Closer examination of this new house in the post–World War II, suburban neighborhood of Westside in L.A. reveals a home that’s ultra-modern, down to its twenty-first-century bones. Its nostalgic form outside is a deliberate gesture by architect Bobby McAlpine to put tradition-bound neighbors at ease. And it works. “With the steep gables and a perfectly symmetrical façade, the street front of this…

It was supposed to be a really small project. The new owners of a Greek Revival residence in Connecticut’s historic Essex Village didn’t like the color of the floors and thought the period-style doors were too thin. Architect Robert Orr, whose eponymous firm is based in New Haven, conducted a cursory consultation, made some suggestions, and figured that was that. Soon, however, the owners called upon him to do another “little” project, and another and another, in what turned out to be an eight-year-long process of renovating the house and the grounds, which has been recognized with a pair of design awards. There was no master plan, per se: everything evolved over time. “This isn’t typically how we do projects,” Orr says, adding that, in this case, “when one project…

WHEN ERIKA JAYNE, owner of Erika Jayne Design, first saw the kitchen, on the second floor of a townhouse, that she’d been asked to renovate, she knew her priority would be opening it up. Despite having served as a model for its Gaithersburg, Maryland, townhouse community, the 2,360-square-foot, four-story home had a kitchen that irritated its new homeowners. And the entire second floor, which also contains a dining space and a family room, was chopped up by walls and columns. “It felt very compartmentalized,” says Jayne. “There weren’t any great sight lines, meaning there was really no feeling of connection.” The homeowners wanted to join the kitchen and dining room into one large area and open up that space to the family room to create a flow from one end…

IT WAS JUST the right moment to make the leap. Living with the landscape surrounding the painstakingly preserved 1742 sea captain’s saltbox no longer matched the family’s evolving lifestyle. When the historic house was moved to its current location, in 1929, it was sited to perch nicely on its two-plus acre site. But ledge runs beneath the site and the slope of the land is so dramatic that the house could be sited only on a diagonal. Although the current homeowners have been in residence since 2008, installing gardens felt like a prohibitively daunting project to tackle while they were raising their young family of four children. In 2020, they were ready for the next step in the property’s evolution. Landscape designer James Doyle loves a challenge. While architect James…

In the middle of a hushed Low Country day, architect Michael Franck sat on the porch of his clients’ elegant home; the dappled blue sky was framed by a rolling green expanse leading to the inland waterway and a wildlife preserve. Franck, principal of his namesake firm in Washington, D.C., was sketching ideas for a pair of walled gardens flanking the sides of the house, a beauty evocative of British West Indies style with a whisper of Bahamian spirit. If it sounds like a dreamscape, in a way it was: While this was part of Franck’s professional practice—he frequently revisits homes to check for tweaks to the architecture and grounds—he was exulting in the creativity that the visit afforded him. For Franck and his frequent collaborator, designer William Miller, marrying…

ALTHEA LEE and her husband, Henry, brought in Julie Dodson of Dodson Interiors to redesign the kitchen of their 5,000-square-foot, four-bedroom home in Houston, Texas. Upon moving in, they’d found a bewildering lack of functionality. “It was a beautiful kitchen, but the way it was situated didn’t give us enough preparation space based on how big the kitchen was,” says Althea Lee. “We wanted more usable space. We really rearranged the whole kitchen.” A big element of that redesign was finding a new location for the six-burner range, which in the original design had been situated inside an L-shaped kitchen island. “It pretty much took up the entire island,” Lee remembers. “We didn’t have space to prep our food because across from stood the fridge and the sink.” To incorporate…

SET ON AN ACRE IN EAST HAMPTON’S exclusive Georgica Pond neighborhood is a new country manor house that looks as though it had been built three centuries ago, then beautifully modified to age gracefully over time. The Colonial-style summer residence, designed by Bories & Shearron Architecture, pairs centuries of accumulated history with contemporary features, particularly in the modern interior layout, which includes a voluminous central stair hall, a step-down living room/dining room, a family room, and a large kitchen. “The client wanted a house with historic character without being a period imitation,” says firm principal Dick Bories. “Our solution was an eclectic interpretation of several historic styles in the manner of the great twentieth-century architect David Adler.” Firm principal James Shearron adds that “it’s an eclectic twentieth-century/twenty-first-century house with nods…