Lincoln Street Residence (Lincoln Barbour)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In this continuing occasional series discussing my favorite architecture of the 2000s, we've already looked at two types of housing: multifamily and new single-family houses. Now let's turn our attention to renovations of single-family homes, including in some cases conversion of another building type.
As I mentioned in previous posts, there surely are all kinds of worthy projects I won't be writing about here. I only realistically see a portion of the projects out there, so this list is not an argument that the projects I'm talking about are the best per se. I'll be the first to admit that I'm also drawing from my own archive of magazine and newspaper stories to a large degree. But if you feel strongly that there's something I've unjustly left out, let me know. A couple of times after previous posts, people have written to argue for their work or I've simply remembered more projects that I loved, and I've amended the original posts to include them.
Where Old Meets New
That preamble notwithstanding, if asked to name house renovations that really caught my attention, two bold alterations of historic early 20th century houses in Southeast Portland immediately come to mind: Fivesquare by Lever Architecture and the Lincoln Street Live/Work by Beebe Skidmore.
There probably are some people out there who look at the classic American Foursquare house that Lever expanded with a glass cube on top, or the large Craftsman that Beebe Skidmore gave a much glassier and contemporary-styled new west-facing facade and think they've been desecrated. On some level I can understand that aversion, because Foursquares and Craftsmans like these are beautiful in their own right. In each of these cases, the contemporary alteration or addition is jarring to the original composition.
However, there are still a whole lot of Foursquare and Craftsman houses out there, and none of them are like these houses. What's more, each project says something about the desire to adapt these homes to modern living or how to expand them.
In the case of Fivesquare, they could have expanded it the way most do: simply adding more in the back of the house. But it's not as if that doesn't change the overall composition too; it just doesn't change the view from the street like Fivesquare's little third-story cube does. Doing it this way lets the original house be itself and the addition be its own thing.
The new square footage expands the unused attic space perches on top of the original 1910 house, at a 45-degree angle, like a modern treehouse, offering panoramic views of the neighborhood. “When we came up with this idea in the studio, everyone liked it,” Lever founder Thomas Robinson told The New York Times in 2015. “I was thinking, ‘Their neighbors are going to hate them — and the historic people are going to think we’ve desecrated this little iconic house.’ But it was intriguing.”
In the case of the Lincoln Street residence, the new glass facade is transformative in terms of the natural light it adds to the space. While it's true that from a side or diagonal view the juxtaposition of the new glass cubes on the west facade against the original Craftsman is quite eye-catching, one can still look at the house straight ahead from the sidewalk and not even notice the change.
I also appreciate the point architect Heidi Beebe made about the spirit of the original. When the house was built over a hundred years ago, she noted in a 2018 New York Times interview, it wasn’t considered nearly as conventional as it is today. In fact, “it was sort of over the top,” she said, with the large decorative beams beneath the overhanging roof and the wooden lattice pattern running down the side of the front porch. “Some people still build Craftsman homes today, but they tend not to have all the flair and oddities of the originals.” Maybe these glass insertions are a little over the top too, but in a way that suits the original spirit. Maybe there's always been a touch of the Postmodern style to this house and we just didn't see it.
Fivesquare (Lincoln Barbour)
If they're a little jarring at first by adding contemporary elements, these additions are actually following historic preservation best practices in a way that many old-home expansions are not. In any non-reservation building project like an office or school, the idea is to make it very clear where the original architecture ends and the new alterations or additions begin. Most historic single-family homes that get renovated or expanded don't do that. They try and disguise that work. In this way, Fivesquare and the Lincoln Street Residence may boldly contrast old and new architecture, but they do it honestly.
Near where these projects stand there are lots where old homes have been torn down and oversized, tritely neo-historic homes have been built in their place. This is another reason to like the two Beebe Skidmore and Lever-designed projects: they're realistic about giving customers the larger, more light-filled homes they want. But they don't eradicate what was there only to patronizingly build something there in a warmed-over, dumbed-down version of that historic style.
One other house comes to mind as a true fusion of the original architecture and a contemporary language. In this case, the original house was midcentury-modern, so it's not a case of juxtaposition so much as the repeating of a rhythm: the Council Crest House, in which Seattle architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (in collaboration with Don Tankersley Construction) transformed a 1952 house in Southwest Portland's Council Crest neighborhood by architect Roscoe Hemenway—which, incidentally, was designed for inventor Karl Kurtz, who developed stereoscopic devices for Sawyer’s, maker of the famous View-Master toy.
Council Crest Residence (Nic Lehoux, Ian Allen)
"There’s a natural progression and sequence: a sort of unfolding and choreography as you go through," said Robert Miller of BCJ in a 2019 Dwell article about the project.
The ground floor’s ceiling was raised to allow a ribbon of clerestory windows, filling the interior with light—especially after a wall separating the dining room and living room was removed. The door and windows on the ground floor were also moved about four feet toward the road, and a wall of basalt fencing added just beyond the exterior to increase privacy. But it is divided into three large sections, allowing passersby on the street to see straight through the interior to the view beyond. A new top floor, a kind of penthouse suite for the couple, was also added, but set back along the north and west from the ground floor to keep a lower profile, with a wall of ipe cladding extending past the edge of the house to form a secluded terrace to the south. The architects also cut a swath of glass into the middle of the top floor on the street-facing side to introduce more light.
"We extended roof lines, decks, and hardscaping as far as we could go," said homeowner Greg Hoffman. "There’s a couple views from the exterior that scream, ‘This is something unique,’ but certainly from an interior standpoint, it’s just really well-executed craftsmanship, with an emphasis on harmony and balance. It’s hard to fully appreciate unless you’re in it."
I have to agree. While the house viewed from outside really does seem like a true hybrid of Hemenway's 1952 original and BCJ's 2018 transformation, the interior is just a cocoon of wood surrounding beautiful furniture and art that gives way to stunning panoramic views.
Warehouse To House
Two of my favorite single-family home projects that transformed their original architecture started not with old houses but warehouses.
The Bowstring Truss House by Works Progress Architecture, completed in 2013, was adapted from a 5,000-square-foot former warehouse and auto repair shop in Northwest Portland. It's all about the wide-open space enabled by a series of four bow-string trusses and the beauty of this exposed roof framing. The design had to then insert a standard residential program that the clients could live among.
Bowstring Truss House (Matthew Williams)
The project had a fairly long gestation. The owners, artist Linda Hutchins and her husband, John Montague, first came across the warehouse in 2006, when she was looking for a new studio. But after walking through the space, Hutchins recalled in a 2015 Dwell article that she told her husband, "I don’t want my studio here. I want to live here." With the real estate market booming, the architects initially recommended tearing down the warehouse, building a new multistory condominium building, and living in the penthouse. "But that really wasn’t why we bought the building," Montague says. The warehouse had to stay.
Make no mistake, though: WPA made the project sing. Key to the whole thing is a small atrium carved into the middle of the space, as well as 11 skylights dotting the roof. There's a couple of bedrooms when you first come in, and more in the back, but the living room and kitchen go around the wood-clad atrium in one big room, with light pouring in from above and from a small adjacent courtyard.
Another warehouse conversion I quite like from the past decade is the Division Street Residence by Emerick Architects. The project began with an 8,000-square-foot one-story building that had been a corner grocery, a printing press and a mechanic’s shop. The intent was to construct an industrial loft on top inspired by the clients’ former apartment in the TriBeCa neighborhood in New York. "We lived in New York in the heyday of loft conversions,” homeowner Joan Childs told Amara Holstein in The New York Times. “The rawer it was, the cooler you were.”
Division Street Residence (Lincoln Barbour)
The 2,400-square-foot loft created on the second story is lined with 13-foot-high windows, which were custom-made to replicate 1930s steel-framed factory windows, only they're made from wood and come with double-paned glass. The interior has few walls save for a single bedroom and bathroom off to one side. Like the atrium does for the Bowstring Truss House, here a large fireplace anchors the combined living and kitchen area. Downstairs includes a guest apartment and two-car garage. But the whole thing looks not much different than the warehouse did before the project began. The upstairs addition feels like it was always there.
Some additions are bold and a juxtaposition of two architectural languages, and others feature additions meant to blend in. There's no wrong answer, just good and bad. Or in this case, good and good.
Midcentury Southwest
There are several houses renovated over the past decade that don't necessarily radically alter what was there, but fine-tune and update the homes, especially the kitchens, in a way that helps these homes come alive again. Just about all of these seem to be located in Southwest Portland or just beyond, in Beaverton.
Many of the projects I'm about to mention were chosen based on love for the original homes as much as the excellence of the renovations themselves, yet a few small moves by contemporary designers and architects can really become some of the best parts of what gets subsequently unveiled.
Take this 1959 William Fletcher House, renovated by Jessica Helgerson Interior Design, where a series of built-in bookshelves, skylights and a red tile-covered kitchen island stand out, and make a nice pairing with the wood surfaces enveloping much of the rest of the interior.
The William Fletcher-designed Ruell residence (Grant Harder)
"It was about being inspired and taking cues from midcentury design," project manager Emily Knudsen Leland of Helgerson's office said in a 2016 Dwell article by Amara Holstein, "but also bringing in modern pieces that fit."
Some of these same qualities exist in Jessica Helgerson Interior Design's renovation of the Feldman House by Saul Zaik. "The house had some really lovely things about it and some really problematic things," Helgerson recalled in Dwell. "But our goal was for it to look as if we hadn’t done anything, to be authentic to the era of the house. What would Saul do?"
The Saul Zaik-designed Fletcher Residence (Grant Harder)
One of my favorite renovations of the past decade to visit was the Sutor House by Pietro Belluschi, its restoration overseen by his son, architect Anthony Belluschi. The Sutor is particularly special in Pietro Belluschi's portfolio. Although it wasn't the first house he designed, it was really the first in what came to be called the Northwest Modern style. It also arrived just a year after the Watzek House, located just a few hundred yards down Skyline Boulevard. Both houses exemplify the marriage of Modernism with Northwest vernacular traditions such as farmhouses, barns and ranch houses. In the case of these two houses, though, they also show a strong Japanese influence, whether it's the Watzek's courtyard or the way the Sutor almost resembles a pagoda.
Inside, Anthony Belluschi's design reconstructed the former maid’s quarters, which had been turned into a breakfast nook, and modernized the kitchen to gain space by moving a wet bar to the dining room. And some of Pietro's original design details look better than ever, such as the woven-wood ceiling at the foyer and the curving wall of zebra wood. Yet the most intriguing aspect of the Sutor renovation may be outside.
While designing the Sutor House, Belluschi befriended Jiro Harada, a professor at the Imperial Household Museum in Tokyo and author of numerous books on Japanese gardens and architecture who was in town as a visiting professor at the University of Oregon. Influenced by Harada, Belluschi and Gerke created an elegant, Japanese-style strolling garden at the house that in later years disappeared through neglect. Homeowner Aric Wood and his family have uncovered that original garden one shovel-full at a time. "It was so overgrown you couldn’t even find the rock wall," Aric Wood said in Dwell. "But we uncovered the rock wall to find the stone steps. We dug out the stone steps and discovered pathways leading down into the forest. It’s been kind of a continuous process of uncovering."
Sutor House (Brian Flaherty)
Then there's the Watzek itself. Although it didn't undergo any kind of renovation that would noticeably alter what's there, the roof has been replaced and other acts of maintenance performed over the past several years. But what's most significant is that starting in 2011 the Watzek House became accessible to the public. it had been bequeathed to the University of Oregon in 1996, but on the condition that Yeon's partner be allowed to keep living there. The arrangement continued until 2011, and now each summer the house is available for public tours. I've been a few times over the years, for tours and a couple private dinners and public talks.
That living room at the Watzek never ceases to amaze me, with its coffered wood ceiling and exquisite detail. The dining area with its floor-to-ceiling glass is also exquisite. Being at the Watzek is like experiencing some kind of handover from traditional architecture into modern, maybe because the furnishings are more traditional. In any case, it's a masterpiece, and quite probably the best house in Oregon.
Watzek House living room (University of Oregon)
I also would like to mention a recent remodel by architect Paul McKean of a Richard Campbell-designed house in Southwest, also just off Skyline Boulevard.
In the early 1960s, architects Richard Campbell and Joachim Grube acquired a parcel of forested land in Portland’s Sylvan Highlands west of downtown that had gone undeveloped because of its uneven topography. Soon the partners co-designed for themselves and their families a pair of houses nestled on two small swaths of high ground.
This Campbell-designed house was completed in 1962 and won an award in Sunset magazine shortly thereafter. For more than a half century the house went unchanged, occupied by Campbell's ex-wife. It's in the main room as one enters, where the kitchen, dining area and living room are combined under one massive pitched roof where one feels submerged in a cocoon of wood.
Cain-Wong Residence (Spin Photography)
"There’s not much drywall in that house," McKean said in Dwell, "just those beautiful cedar ceilings and the Douglas fir beams."
Finally, there is the one house on my list that's not in Portland but rather Beaverton: the Heather Court residence by Garrison Hullinger Interior Design. It's a remodel of one of many homes in the area built by Robert Rummer, and to my eyes this is one of the best Rummer treatments I've seen.
Rummers have always had an inherent challenge, I think: their atriums. I've been in several of these homes over the years, and often there are these spaces between the entry and the main living/dining area. They bring in light and work almost like covered outdoor areas, but homeowners often seem clueless about what to do with them. They're not literally outside, after all, yet they're also not a traditional room of the house that has a function.
Heather Court Residence (Blackstone Edge Studios)
Like most, this house's atrium had become an extended foyer. But Hullinger’s team, led by interior designer Nikki Maeda, made the atrium feel more fully like the outdoors, adding a naturally stained teak deck and even placing clusters of river rocks in the corners, as if the deck were a floating dock. Next to a cluster of garden chairs, a wall of decorative patterned concrete tiles draws the eye. Instead of a pass-through space, the glass-roofed atrium now acts more like an enclosed front yard.
As I write this, almost all of us have been spending more time at home than ever. It's shelter from the elements and from exposure to Covid-19. Sensing that this pandemic may take years for the world to fully recover from, especially given the tragically inept response from our corrupt national leadership and how it's cost us many lives, it may be that home designs and home renovations in the years ahead become more modest. Or given how international travel seems destined to become more seldom and more expensive, perhaps we'll instead double down on fixing up our homes.
Yet these renovations are perhaps also a reminder that both good and bad times come and go. These houses have seen many decades, and chances are they will survive both the pandemic and the threat to democracy we face today. That's comforting.
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