Mid-Century Design Cornerstones: Asymmetry

15 min readAsymmetry is one of the cornerstones of mid mod design. Learn how to use these cornerstones to keep the mid mod in your mid-century remodel.

Asymmetry, in a nutshell, is all about balance rather than matching.

Mid-century houses show off their design chops – their jauntiness their specialness – with well balanced asymmetry. And even a basic mid-century builder-grade ranch like the one I live in can still have fun design features that come from the way its spaces are organized horizontally and asymmetrically

The Cornerstones of Mid Mod Design Series

This is one of a five-part series on the Mid Mod Update Design Cornerstones. If you’ve ever wanted to know HOW to add a little more Mid Mod charm to your home … start here. Make sure you listen to all four so that you can:

  • Keep your house balanced while you play with ASYMMETRY
  • Choose the right SIMPLE SHAPES to keep those clean modern lines
  • Highlight a MIX OF MATERIALS to make your home shine
  • Add or enhance the FLOW BETWEEN SPACES (in and around your home)
  • Pull it all together with a listener Q&A

Grab my easy Mid Mod Update Design Cornerstones guide to make it easy!

mid mod design cornerstones guide: learn about asymmetry, simple shapes, the mix of materials, and flow between spaces in a great mid mod home update

Symmetry vs Asymmetry

In previous building eras, impressive home design showed its classiness with repeating, matching elements along a central line. Rows of windows or columns,  repeating arches, aligned dormers.

Picture the perfectly balanced windows on Colonial homes. Or the repeating arches on the porch of an Italianate farmhouse. And, of course, the cutie pie twin dormers on a classic Cape Cod.

These elements feel formal, weighty and grand.   

(They also made a big splash by being, well, big. And tall. The more stories the more important the homeowner.)

Then the mid-century aesthetic challenged this formality. Mid-century design is about being off-center and less structured, but still balanced. 

What’s great about asymmetry?

The good news is this makes your life easy. You don’t have to worry about matching your addition to other side of the house. As long as it is scaled and weighted to work with your home, you can put it where you need it. 

Likewise, when you’re decorating inside your house, you don’t need to have to have every element aligned outwards and in rows. You can combine one big image or object with two smaller images or objects on the same wall. Instead of trying to force artificially matching designs on your life, you can lean in to differences. Mid-century design choices can be playful, flexible and fun.

Highlight asymmetry in your home update.

Does your house already have some fun asymmetry? Probably there is a garage on one side and bedrooms on the other with a front door (not quite on center) in the middle? Great! A fireplace that stands closer to one corner than another? Fab! An uneven arrangement of builtins in the basement? Love it! Now lean in!

Make the difference obvious

There are two secrets to making asymmetry work in your home. First, emphasize the difference between two sides with purpose. Nothing is more irritating to the eye than an almost symmetrical design. An almost symmetrical design will look like you aimed for symmetry and missed. 

(And) find balance

Second, find balance for humans. We are bilaterally symmetrical and we do like things to feel even. A room or a building it doesn’t need to match one side to the other, but be sure that each side has the same visual weight. Balance a taller element with a horizontal. Or use a lighter or darker color to balance elements of different height or weight. 

The squint test can help you determine whether you’ve found balance. When you squint and look do the elements feel balanced? 

Watch a quick lesson in asymmetry:

Or listen to the full podcast episode on 

Apple | Google |  Spotify

Want to catch the full videos on Instagram?

Resources to help you design the cornerstones into your remodel

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

When you’re planning to make changes to your mid-century home, you want to make sure that you’re honoring perhaps even enhancing its mid-century street cred. You want to make the design more so not less as you make upgrades, and make sure you don’t end up sterilizing the house. 

But before you can make good choices to keep the mid-century spirit alive and well, or build in the fun details that might always have been missing, you need to have some idea of what makes a building’s design mid mod. And it’s not just the date your house was constructed. To that end, this month, we’re going to spend some time talking about the cornerstones of mid-century design. 

What materials layout choices, design moves and underlying principles make a house look and feel mid mod? Are you ready to go over them? We’re kicking off today by talking about asymmetry. Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes helping you match mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host della Hansmann architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1501. 

Happy December, my mid mod friend. This month, I’m bringing you a blast from the past a series of design talks I gave on Instagram One summer, I originally developed the series to be delivered five days in a row. So you’ll occasionally hear me saying tomorrow or the day after that just translate in your head to next week. And the week after that, if you will. It’ll save me a whole bunch of audio editing. 

Each week this month, we’ll be covering one of these four cornerstones. Grab the free resource that goes along with this topic at the show notes page at mad mad dash midwest.com/ 1501 Or go directly to the source and grab it from mid mod dash midwest.com/cornerstones. One more thing before I hand you off to past Della. This week, this week is the perfect week to set your 2024 remodeling plans in motion by reaching out to work with Mid Mod Midwest. 

I know you might have been putting this off for a while. But make it happen right now. Here’s what I want you to do, head over to our website and check out the page called work with us. You can read all about how a master plan works, or even watch the helpful and motivational explainer video about our process. And then just click the orange button that says apply to work with us. There’s a simple form that asks you some easy questions about your house and what you want to adjust about it, then hit send. 

We’ll get right back to you with a scheduler to set up a Zoom call so that you and I can chat about the project and make sure you’re a good fit for us. And we’re a good fit for you. If all goes well, we could be slotting you into our design calendar for early 2024. But don’t wait too long. The projects we’re booking now probably won’t be coming back to their homeowners until March. So shorten up your wait time by getting your name in our design queue right now. 

Okay, here you go. 

Hey, welcome. Today, we are talking about the cornerstones of mid-century remodels, that is design principles you can use to make sure that if your house is already been century, and you want to make changes to it so that the changes you make won’t diminish its mid-century quality. Also, I did a poll in my story earlier today and about 60% of people who responded were in that category. But about 40% were also in the category of or we’re instead in the category of they live in a house built in the mid-century era, but it doesn’t have as much of its mid-century quality anymore. 

How can you put it back? The same cornerstones apply. So we’re gonna be here all week, I’m gonna be here all week talking to you about these principles. We’ll go one per day. Today we’re talking about asymmetry. Tomorrow, we’ll be talking about how to use simple, playful mid-century shapes. On Wednesday, we’re going to talk about the mix of materials that suit and then century house. And on Thursday, we’re going to talk about flow between spaces that in now in ineluctable essential quality of mid-century design. 

We’ll go through all of these in detail. If you’re watching this on a replay, you might want to go right ahead and grab the downloadable workbook that follows on lays out all of these cornerstones, you can get it at the link in my bio, or you can go to midmod-midwest.com/cornerstones and grab it. And it’s got some exercises to help you think about the design questions as they apply to your house. 

But if you are here with me live, say hello. It’s so exciting to see you here. And if you have questions about the things that I’m saying, as I’m saying them, ask and I will try to catch all of those questions, if not quite in real-time as they’re coming up, and make sure that you’re feeling a lot of clarity around these fun design questions. So let’s see. I’ve got my outline over here so I can stay organized. Grab the workbook before we get into any of the cornerstones. 

And before we get into asymmetry. Specifically, I got asked a great question today by Margie. She says, what timeframe constitutes the mid-century? Our home is from 1976, but it has all the MCM feels. This is a great question. In fact, I just got asked the opposite direction by someone else in my DMs recently they were wondering, is their house mid-century because it was built a little earlier and they feel like it’s a bit more of a from an earlier time. 

And so this is a question that comes up a lot is a question that kind of has to do with historical rail And kinda has to do with how your house is based on its location based on its builder. And the answer really, though, is like any house built during the middle of the century is a mid-century house. By definition, mid-century design is a made-up term that we use to categorize things from roughly the middle of the last century. 

So from like, 1945 to 1965, you’re right there in the middle of it, probably even maybe from like 1955 to 1965. That’s a guarantee. But there was some great modernist design happening even as early as the 1930s, that we would now glance at and say, Oh, that’s a mid-century design. And also, there were houses being built well into the 70s, borderline as we get towards the 80s, that still have some of these design qualities. 

So if your house looks to you like it has some of the qualities we’re gonna be talking about today, and or you wish that it did, you can start to apply them at Central design principles to your house, and they will make it feel more MCM. 

Now, that is an interesting term, MCM, Mid-Century Modern, not every house built during the mid-century era, is what we would call today mid-century modern, some of them are more mid-century vintage, a little bit more mid-century traditional. And they might have less of the things that I’m talking about today. There’s a reason I called this series, the cornerstones of mid mod design. And if you’re here, if you’re watching this, that’s probably because you like these things. 

So let’s get right into it. If you have the workbook, grab it and follow along, because first I’m going to give you a quick little overview on the concept of asymmetry. mid-century houses, unlike houses built before them, show off their design, their jaunty knows their specialness, not by being as tall as possible. Earlier, fancier houses were always at least two stories, mid-century houses could be very high-end with just one level. And even a basic mid-century builder-grade ranch like the one I live in can still have fun design features that come from the way its spaces are organized horizontally and asymmetrically. 

Let’s talk about a couple of places you can find mid-century design in your house. An obvious one that comes up all the time is the front door, or let’s say your whole street view of your house, your curb appeal. A mid-century house is not going to be organized symmetrically. The door is not right in the middle. There aren’t two windows right on either side of it. But a lot of people when they’re trying to figure out what can they do to update their house will lean back into symmetrical choices, because it feels logical to them or because they’re getting their advice from like cottage core HGTV kind of people. 

There are some places where symmetry makes sense. For example, if you have light fixtures on either side of your door, I don’t recommend that you get rid of one that would be impractical and expensive. And it’s nice to have good even light on both sides of a door when you open the door at night to see who’s out there. But you don’t have to then go ahead and put matching everything on both sides of your door. 

Instead, if you’ve got house numbers, put big house numbers down one side of your house, and then the mailbox may be on the other side. If you feel like your house is starting to get too symmetrical in a place, break it up. You can put in a fun planter or a bench that encloses the door on one side. 

You can start to think about how do you personally approach your house from which side from which direction more often. How do most people come up to your house? What’s the connection between your front door and for example your driveway? In the Midwest when there’s snow on the ground, we tend to approach front doors not from the sidewalk but up the driveway and across that little sidewalk. 

Thinking about people’s approach to your house. And then sort of creating wrapping and closing effects with your front door with the asymmetry of it can be a really powerful design move to make it feel jaunty, playful and purposeful. 

If you’ve grabbed the workbook, and if you watch the introductory video that I’ve got, I linked to it in my story earlier today, you’ll know that one of the important ways to make asymmetry work for your house is to lean into it hard enough to look like it’s on purpose. Nothing is more uncomfortable than to feel like someone tried for symmetry and missed. 

So you really want to put like a big thing on one side and a long horizontal thing on the other side of your door. If you’re going to have light fixtures that match you want to do something else that really doesn’t to make sure you’re doing this in a really intentional way. If you’ve got questions about asymmetry and your front door asking if I’m going to move on to another space, how about in the living room, you may or may not have any of your original potential features in your living room. 

But if you’re lucky enough to have some, you might have a gorgeous mid-century hearth decorated in tile brick or stone. We’ll come back to that topic. All of these four cornerstones of mid-century design asymmetry mix of materials, simple shapes and flow between spaces kind of help each other out, go hand in hand.

You’ll definitely find me talking about your living room, whatever your hearth is decorated with showing up on the outside of your house later this week when we’re talking about the flow between spaces, but if you’re thinking about your hearth, from a code perspective, it may have an equal amount of stone brick, whatever, decorative material on either side of the fireplace, or it might be that one side of it extends further towards the wall than the other. There’s the asymmetry playing in. 

If you do have an evenly spaced amount of, you know, sort of the minimum amount in my house at the minimum amount of stone on both sides of the hearth opening, you can still play off asymmetry by putting a tall vertical element row of built-in bookshelves along one side. 

Figuring out which way the room wants to lean is an important part of deciding how to make asymmetry work for your house. And this is actually one of my favorite things about how asymmetry works in mid-century design, it’s casual, it’s livable. Symmetry is very formal. And if you were ever on the other side, it starts to feel more something you’re looking at, rather than something that invites you to come in. 

If you arrange your living room with furniture, that’s part of creating corners, it makes you feel you can come in, you can sit down on a sofa that might wrap in an L or sit into chairs that face towards the window, these things are going to make it feel more casual, more inviting for you to be part of it. Oh, I’m having a little bit of lag in my video. So fingers crossed, this all works out. I’m going to carry on assuming that Instagram is going to catch this for me. And if it doesn’t, we’ll start over. 

Let’s see other spaces, you might find asymmetry in the bedroom. This is actually a place where it’s really hard to resist this symmetry have a bed for two people with bedside tables on two sides. I hate it when the video lags This is making me so uncomfortable. Well, bear with me if you can, everybody, I love having you here for this and we’ll just do our best. 

I think though its mid-century bedrooms are often very small, it was not really considered to be like the giant master suite, or the owner suite wasn’t really a design priority in the era. So if you’re trying to make the most of your space in a small bedroom, you can’t lean too hard into symmetry. 

Sure, you probably each want to have a bedside table. But as soon as you get away from that, you want to think more about the flow of the space about the way your storage units are going to happen. And let the room again, figure out sort of what are your two primary walls, what’s the enclosing corner of your bedroom, and then build the room out from that space. All right, you guys are saying it’s coming through. 

Okay, so I’m gonna assume the video is just lagging at me to make me anxious, but I don’t care about it because I just want to talk to you about design. Here’s the last space, I want to talk about how you can find asymmetry in your house, and how you can make asymmetry in your house in your exterior, outside rooms. 

We talked about the front of the house. But one of the spaces I love most in a mid-century house is the way that it responds to its backyard. mid-century houses were about casual flow and living the sort of iconic avatar of a mid-century cool mid mod house is a California sort of flow straight out to the backyard, possibly to a kidney-shaped pool or patio space. 

In those houses, part of what makes them so great is there’s not just a cliff wall edge of house, even if it’s you know, dissolving into glass. There’s some sort of wrapping enclosing element. And so most mid-century, modest houses like mine were a simple rectangle when they were built, usually facing the street. They’ve got bedrooms in this on one side social spaces in the middle than a garage. And they have you know, sort of basically a horizontal edge at the front of the house and a horizontal edge of the back of the house to the backyard. 

But the what you can do to make your house so much better. And what may already have been done, it’s a very common inter-period addition is to have some part of the house or to push out towards the backyard to create another one of those enclosing L-shaped spaces. 

Humans have a deep psychological need to feel enclosed, we just like to feel like we’re protected. We’ve got our back to the wall, but not just to a wall but to a corner in a good way, like no one’s gonna get you from behind and maybe also slightly from above. And if you can create a sense in your house with a small addition, a screen porch, an extra bedroom that comes off and an L shape from the house, the space can close in that L is incredibly good space. It’s incredibly powerful, fun, welcoming space that just kind of invites you to step outside and then step down into the yard. 

Having that flow is the most powerful thing you can do in terms of layout and floorplan changes. Now I’m going to be talking so much more about the way to create a really welcoming a really inviting outdoor space at the mid-century design clinic that’s happening. Let’s see a week from this Saturday on August 6. And I really encourage you to be there if you want to. It’s going to be two hours long. 

We’re going to in real-time walk through the process of designing your mid-century deck patio replacement remodel edition as it is and we’ll go through the steps of the master plan process while we do it. But basically what I want everyone who comes to that workshop to get is that asymmetrical design is one of the most powerful moves you can make in the floorplan of an outdoor space. 

Because it kind of starts to create these layers where you’re invited, first to step out onto a patio onto a deck, perhaps at the same height as your interior space, then maybe down onto a patio, then out into the yard itself. And as you have this sort of enclosing step-down space, you start to feel like it’s all just layers of your home, even your yard is your home. And that’s one of the power moves of mid-century house, even here in the Midwest where we can’t throw open the windows, to bugs, to winter weather to everything, throw up on the walls of the house and just dissolve the space between inside and out, we can still create that effect. 

One of the most delightful ways to experience outside of your house during inclement weather is to be able to look out a window in your house, and then see back in through another window in your house. And between those two interior spaces. There’s an outside space, a patio courtyard, a deck that feels like it’s just waiting there for you to go occupy it when the weather gets better, but it already feels like it’s adding to the physical to the psychological space of your house. 

So now you have a little better idea of how to spot asymmetry where it might be happening in your mid-century home, and where you might be able to add or embrace it. That balanced but not symmetrical effect is key to differentiating your mid-century home from the cottage-style homes that came before it and are so popular on the design shows of HGTV right now. 

But those aren’t the right choices for our homes. If you’re thinking about floorplan changes. If you’re thinking about how to make an addition, I want you to know that you can let it be easy let it work for you the way you want to live your life rather than worrying about oh, I can’t put an addition here because there’s nothing on the other side. That could be a good thing. 

Think about how you’re going to create enclosing corners, inside your house’s edges and around your house to really empower yourself to get the mid-century jaunty Enos that mid-century sense of playfulness in your mid-century era house or put it back when you remodel. 

Grab the mid-century design cornerstones workbook, or just find the transcript and other resources from this episode at midmod-midwest.com/1501. And don’t forget that this is the perfect week to get yourself into design q4 mid-century master plan for next year. I will find some places to add interesting asymmetry to your home for you. 

Next week, we’ll be talking about choosing and effectively using the right mid-century shapes for your house and how to make great material choices the week after that. Stay tuned. Catch you next week. Bye bye, remodelers.

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