Mid-century modern renovation in DC, Maryland and Virginia. Editing, rather than expanding.
These houses are usually better than the decades of improvements laid on top of them.
A modernist house was built around an idea. An open plan reaching toward a courtyard, a structural bay that never varies, a glass wall holding the whole relationship to the site. Fifty years of well-meant improvements tend to bury that idea rather than remove it. Partitions get added, openings get closed, a soffit gets dropped, and the house slowly stops explaining itself.
So the work is frequently subtraction. A curatorial process of simplification and editing, rather than one of expansion or addition. The house does not get larger. It gets unobstructed.
That is not preservation for its own sake. These houses were designed for a way of living that has changed, and the kitchen, the primary suite, the insulation and the glazing usually do need real work. The discipline is knowing which parts are dated and which parts were the point.
The first move is reading the house. Finding the structural grid, the original circulation, the intended relationship between inside and the site, and separating those from everything added since.
Some of what looks like a problem is the design. A narrow corridor or a low ceiling at the entry is often deliberate, set up so the next room opens. Removing it removes the effect it was built to produce.
Fragmented rooms consolidate back into continuous space. Bedrooms and baths get resized for how a family lives now. Storage, mechanical and plumbing get consolidated into a thickened wall or a spine so the open side of the house stays open.
Glazing, insulation and mechanical systems are usually the least glamorous and most necessary part of the scope. A modernist house with a wall of single glazing is beautiful and expensive to live in.
A restrained palette lets the site do the work. White walls and a quiet material range mean summer greenery, fall foliage, winter snow and spring blossom become part of the interior rather than competing with it.
And a house that is worth more than the one that would have replaced it, because what it has cannot be reproduced by a builder working from a plan book.
Washington and its suburbs hold more modernist housing than they are usually given credit for, most of it in enclaves rather than spread evenly across the map.
Hollin Hills, in Alexandria, is the best known. Charles Goodman houses set into the topography with post and beam framing and glass walls, on lots that were deliberately left wooded. The renovation logic there has to follow the structural logic, because the frame is the architecture.
Bannockburn Estates, in Bethesda, holds mid-century houses on wooded lots where the standing assumption is often that a worn one comes down for a spec house. Drumaldry, off Greentree Road, is a 1970s modern enclave of board and batten with redwood trim, cedar shake roofs and brick garden walls forming private courtyards, standing out among the colonial building stock around it.
Harbour Square, at the Southwest Waterfront, is a designated historic mid-century modern complex where the constraints are different again. Co-op and condo boards, shared systems, no core drilling, and a building whose original details are worth salvaging rather than discarding.
I am licensed in DC, Maryland, Virginia and Massachusetts, which matters here more than usual. Three jurisdictions means three sets of reviewers, three code paths and three timelines, and on a modernist house the code path frequently shapes the design.
Yes, and usually by removing rather than adding. The organizing idea is generally still there under the accumulated changes, and the renovation is often a matter of clearing back to it.
What ruins these houses is treating them as generic old stock. Dropping a conventional plan onto a post and beam frame, or closing a glass wall to gain a room, wins the room and loses the house.
The comparison people make is the tired house as it stands today against a clean new build, and that comparison is not fair to the house. The right comparison is the edited house against the new build.
A worn modernist house frequently has better light, better siting and a better relationship to its lot than anything a developer would put in its place, because the lot was chosen for the house rather than the house dropped on the lot. Those are the things that cannot be added later.
Yes. Hollin Hills houses have a particular structural and planning logic, and a renovation strategy either works with it or fights it for the length of the project.
The usual questions are how to gain a primary suite without breaking the plan, and how to update the glazing and insulation without losing the transparency that made the house worth buying.
The kitchen and the primary suite, nearly always. Both were sized for how people lived seventy years ago, when the kitchen was a closed service room and the primary bedroom was simply the largest bedroom.
Then the unglamorous half of the scope. Glazing, insulation, and mechanical and electrical systems that are at or past the end of their lives. The plan itself is usually in better shape than owners expect.
It matters as information, not as a constraint. Knowing who designed the house and what they were working on tells you which moves are original and which are later, and that is the distinction the whole renovation turns on.
It also occasionally matters to the market. A documented house by a known modernist carries value that a renovation can either protect or erase.
"A curatorial process of simplification and editing, rather than one of expansion or addition."
Luis Boza · On renovating a modernist house
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