photograph by ross group creative
Expanding the kitchen was a major priority for these Midtown homeowners. Architect John Harrison Jones subtly gained more space by pushing the island into the new addition.
After you’ve lived in a house for a while, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself, should we stay, or should we go? Your life has changed over the years, so what you needed a decade or two ago is not necessarily what you need today.
A family in Midtown recently found themselves asking this question. They had lived in their 1912 house for about 20 years and raised a family there. Over time, they had slowly changed what they could, and the home was all the better for it. But now, they’re down to one teenager at home, and the limitations of their current dwelling were clear.
“The kitchen was very small,” say the homeowners (who asked to remain anonymous). “We really didn’t have much of a family room, but a very small area where our TV and sofa were, and it was tiny. The back of the house consisted of an enclosed porch that was not on a proper foundation, so the back of the house was gradually sinking. We had a gap in our back door that probably dropped two inches in ten years. Right before we did the demolition, we had a squirrel living in there. It was time.”
photograph by ross group creative
Seen in this “before” photo, the kitchen was dark and cramped and needed updating.
Instead of moving, the homeowners enlisted architect John Jones and RKA Construction to reimagine their familiar space. “These homeowners had dreamed of this project for years and had a vision of what they wanted, visually and functionally,” says Logan Ray, senior project manager for RKA Construction.
“They wanted some living area, they wanted to improve the kitchen, and they wanted some utility space so they could do things like laundry,” says Jones. “The big idea is the addition on the back for a family room with bookcases. There’s an entry — kind of a transition space, when you come in from the outdoors — and then there’s a family room with a fireplace, a television, and bookcases that’s open to the kitchen. The kitchen is all new appointments: Metalwork, appliances, and everything are all new.”
photograph by ross group creative
This new family room was built onto the back of a 1912 foursquare. The built-in bookcases were a plus for this family of avid readers.
Reconceptualizing
“The challenge is to solve a problem, and to do it in a way that is sympathetic to the original house,” he says. “A lot of those houses have a lot of integrity, and they’re really nice. And so I like to do something that feels like it’s always been part of it.”
“He’s a very talented architect, and he gets it,” say the homeowners. “He’s lived in Midtown for a long time, and now downtown. Our biggest thing was wanting it to feel like the addition married with the rest of the house. We didn’t want it to look like a brand-new, shiny house attached to a 1912 home.”
They appreciated that Jones cautioned them that their original plans might change. “He’s done so many of these and he’s got good insight about certain things that we thought we wanted. He was like, ‘I’m telling you, in these houses I’ve done, they don’t use whatever it is that they thought they wanted,’ or he said, ‘This is one of those areas where you might want to go a little further than you thought you wanted to go.’ So we relied on his experience a lot in terms of what works well and what doesn’t.”
Since they moved in, the homeowners had been trekking to the basement to do their laundry. That needed to change, so Jones suggested adding a scullery.
“We just did some reorganizing of the ground floor plan to facilitate the utility function that they wanted — a storage room, pantry, laundry room, a half bath, that sort of thing,” he says. “We actually took over what I guess had been a bedroom back in the day. The house is what’s called a four-square plan. You basically have four big spaces around a central hallway. And so we used one of those rooms to put utility space into it.”
The scullery also doubles as a connecting space between the front and rear of the house. The homeowners used a pair of glass French doors, which they had removed in an earlier renovation phase and saved for just such an occasion, to control access to the new room. The scullery added a lot of sorely needed storage space, including two large pantries with rolling shelves.
Lack of storage is a common problem Jones encounters when renovating older homes. “People didn’t have closets back in the day,” he says. “They had an armoire, probably. Their living patterns were way different from what we have today. They didn’t have a giant wardrobe of clothing, and the kitchen was segregated from the rest of the house. Today’s living pattern is, everybody wants to be in one big tent, and we’ve all got too much stuff.”
photograph by ross group creative
The homeowners had never worked with an interior designer before hiring Anna Lattimore.
Unknown Challenges
One of the biggest challenges in remodeling older homes is the unknown of what is behind walls and above ceilings,” says Ray. “There is no guarantee how the home was constructed and what condition the original structure is in after so many years. While these older homes are beautiful and full of history, they are also full of surprises.”
photograph by ross group creative
After doing laundry in their basement for 20 years, the addition of the scullery meant that washing was more convenient. “It’s hard to imagine what it was before,” say the homeowners.
For this home, the biggest surprise came from outside. The renovation timeline coincided with the worst of the post-pandemic supply-chain problems. “It couldn’t have been a worse time from a materials cost standpoint,” say the homeowners. “We caught the peak of the lumber market. There’s some really expensive wood in this house.”
“There were some surprises during the demolition phase, but with the help of the design team and our trade partners, we were able to overcome these obstacles without jeopardizing any of the extremely intentional architectural details on the project,” says Ray.
Both architect and contractor agree: If you’re embarking on a major home renovation, it’s ideal to find another place to stay for a little while. “Definitely be prepared to move out,” says Jones. “It’s really hard to live through construction.”
But these homeowners decided to stick it out. “With the increase in price over what we had originally estimated with materials and labor, we were going to just live here and make it work and not spend money on going and renting another house or an Airbnb or a hotel,” they say. “We were just going to suck it up and make it work and spend our money in here, not on something temporary, just to make us more comfortable while the work was going on.” Even so, they admit, “It was pretty traumatic because we basically had to move our kitchen to the dining room.”
photograph by ross group creative
This room, located in the back of the house, was cannibalized to create the scullery.
Depending on a microwave, with no running water on the first floor, the homeowners washed their dishes in the upstairs shower. “We bought those big busing bins that the restaurants use and just hauled stuff upstairs,” they say. “And thankfully we found the air fryer, which expanded our options on meals when the slow cooker just wasn’t doing it.”
“It’s a stressful process, and you have to be a little bit flexible, and your expectations need to be flexible, because things are very expensive these days, and things don’t move quite as fast as you hoped they would,” says Jones.
But after months of work, expense, and hardship, the chaos was worth it. Today, the homeowners say they barely think about the inconveniences of the renovation period. “They’re all distant memories and we’re very easygoing people. It’s hard to imagine what it was before and just how we lived in it before. This is how we always wanted to live in this house.”
