Renovating a Mid-Century Landmark Part 2: Planning and Designing

In Part 1 of this blog series, we told the story of how homeowners, Ron and Sarah Villacarillo, found this diamond in the rough and brought us in to help create a vision they had for the house.

In today’s blog we’ll dive into the planning and construction phases. These phases are often overlooked when you see before and after pictures. But that in between work is the most important, so today we’re pulling back the curtain on the ins and outs of a gut renovation. 

As a design/build firm, we are able to see projects from beginning to end. In the case of the Villacarillos, we were inside the house, brainstorming ideas before they had even purchased it. Once they had closed on their house, the design/planning phase began. 

A whole house renovation requires hundreds of design decisions - weighing each option with budget, durability and liveability in mind - but that process is always easier when you start with something you’re excited about. 

-Bronwen Warner, Lead Designer

Homeowners Ron and Sarah are creative and decisive and had a good idea of what they wanted. They came into the planning phase with beautiful tiles, wallpaper and light fixtures they had already chosen and that helped drive other selections throughout the house. 

A selection of material samples the homeowners chose early in the process.

Ron brought his graphic design skills to the table, putting together renderings in Photoshop that helped us work together to fill in the missing pieces and make the vision a reality. 

It was critical that the home pay homage to its era, and so everyone took the time to research period architecture and explore mid-century colors and materials to help inform the design decisions that worked well with the house and reflected their personal style. 

The home is attributed to local mid-century architect Alan McCullough, research on some of his other work, seen in the picture above.

More bits of research pulled from vintage mid-century magazines for color and material inspiration.

For all of our projects, we start by tackling as many product and finish selections as possible before construction begins. We find this eliminates the high-stress, last-minute decision making that can make homeowners feel like they’re under pressure. Using tools like SketchUp, we can model the design decisions to great specificity so that changes can be made digitally before construction begins. 

Using Ron’s photoshop rendering as a starting point, the colors and materials were put into our SketchUp model. We update this model as the details and project develops.

The house after wood soffit was installed and the exterior has been painted.

As we like to do with many of our historic renovations, we worked hard to reuse and restore original features when possible. The original kitchen light fixtures were rewired and will be located over the new kitchen island. A new kitchen door was made to match the original pair of dining room doors. The oak floors and unique entry handrail have both been refinished on the first floor, and the original concrete floors (stripped of the asbestos tile, glue and carpeting that were stuck on top of them) have been patched and polished to a beautiful new shine. 

One of the most fun and challenging parts of the design phase is developing a custom design with the client that works for their particular lifestyle. Every design we create is uniquely shaped by the day-to-day details. In the kitchen we used a series of sketchup models to develop and refine the kitchen cabinetry layout and kitchen details down to cabinet door styles, drawer configurations, countertop seam locations and the best place to plug in a phone or laptop. 

A series of SketchUp iterations of the kitchen as we refined and developed the design.

The final design being implemented - always such a fun thing to see!

Once construction begins, the designer doesn’t just step away, though. On any given day, Bronwen is on the job site, reviewing products or layouts with a subcontractor, researching finishes, reviewing details with our carpentry crew and keeping the clients up to date on what’s happening in their home that week. 

In our next installation of this blog series, we’ll walk through some of the construction challenges we encountered and how we were able to overcome or incorporate them so stay tuned!