Let’s Review: Distill your style then Draft options to for a Tailored Timeless update

24 min readI’m taking July off from recording the podcast this summer but that doesn’t mean YOU have to. In fact, I’m actually pretty excited about what I’ve got planned for you. I took a dip through our deep archives (did you know we have over 250 episodes recorded) and pulled together some throwback episodes that have great content but may be SO FAR BACK in your podcast feed that you’re unlikely ever to hit them. For these four weeks I’ve chosen some fun episode pairings from the past that will take us on a little spin through the master plan method. So sit back and relax and get read to get inspired to do little more for your home and for yourself.

A great remodel for a mid-century home needs to be a good fit for you. 

And it needs to be a good fit … for your mid-century home. 

If you don’t make an effort to fit your home to your actual life, you’ll never really feel satisfied with the way things turned out – the house will feel too formal, too closed off, too open for your life.  

BUT if you don’t remember to plan a remodel that fits the mid-century era of your home … your too-trendy choices will rapidly become dated ones. 

To help you plan a tailored timeless remodel, I’ll share two episodes that encapsulate some of my core beliefs and strategies around making a strong mid-century choices to update your mid-century house.

If this feels top of mind for you right now, both of these are topics that I’ve covered endlessly for my Ready to Remodel students and that I include in every single Mid-Century Master Plan. 

Those are both GREAT options but there’s so much value in just touching on these ideas that, if you start from this episode, you will be head and shoulders better prepared to plan a remodel that is timeless and that preserves or puts back your homes, mid-century character, even as you modify it to better fit your family, to fit your life.

If you’re feeling fired up to know more about distilling your style or really tailoring a space in your house to fit your life, maybe check out one of my Mid-Century Design Clinics. 


I’ve got fun and easy two-hour workshops focused on nearly every space in or around your house.  OR if you want help on setting the style for the whole space then hop straight to the More than a Mood Board clinic because it has got the good for you!

I’m gonna be touching on the method that I teach that Mood Board workshop — the SIMPLE Style Guide System in this first best of episode, but I think that at the time I recorded this, I haven’t yet given a clinic or a workshop on the topic. It was only something that I taught inside of the Ready to Remodel program. Which by the way, I still do.

One way or another this is a great introduction to that concept. So enjoy!

Episode 505

Episode 903

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

A great remodel for a mid-century home needs to be a good fit for you, the person that’s going to live in it, and it needs to be a good fit for your mid-century home. If you don’t make an effort on that first point to fit your home to your actual life, you’ll never feel truly satisfied with the way things turned out. The house will feel too formal, too closed off, too open for your life.

But if you don’t remember to plan a remodel that fits the mid-century era of your house, two trendy choices will rapidly become dated ones. The last two weeks of episode replays are going to help you with that first goal, how to remember what’s important in remodel and how to be enough of an expert in your home that you can lead with confidence no matter who you’re incorporating into your plans.

And this week, I’m going to share two episodes that encapsulate some of my core beliefs and strategies around making a strong mid-century choice to update a mid-century house. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mob remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2122.

So I’m taking the last two weeks and the next two weeks off from recording new podcast content this summer but still have great episodes for you. That’s because I’m pairing or tripletting, in some past cases, several of my favorite archived episodes that all fall into the category of how to make a great mid-century master plan.

So far, we’ve talked about how to predesign your remodel, and this week, we are going to talk about how to bake mid-century design features into the changes that you make as you adjust the layout to fit your life as you expand or shift spaces around how to make sure that you are consistently incorporating mid-century elements into your home. The best way that I know to do that is to set a style guide to use, in fact, my simple style guide system and to focus on the four cornerstones of mid-century design.

Now, I’ve covered these topics in many other places and in detail. This is a shorthand for what I teach inside of my ready to remodel program in detail and what I carry out for my master plan clients. But if you start from just these two episodes today, you will be head and shoulders better prepared to plan a remodel that is timeless and that preserves or puts back your home’s mid-century character, even as you modify it to fit your family, your life, your modern life in general.

By the way, if either of these episodes get you fired up to know more, then I would direct you to check out one of my mid-century design clinics, these two hour workshops. Teach the mini Master Plan process on a specific topic, and I’ve given them a number of times on different places, so you can watch the recordings on demand anytime you want, and just head over to mid mod midwest.com/clinic to see an array of workshops where I have focused the Master Plan method on kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms, additions, exterior curb appeal updates and creating good outdoor spaces for your home. I think there’s maybe even another one I can’t think of right now.

Or if you’re more concerned with getting the exact style choices right for your overall remodel, you’ll want to check out the workshop specifically devoted to style guides, which is called more than a mood board. It really walks you through everything you need to know to take yourself from a host of disorganized Pinterest links down to a set of pre-established choices that will simplify every decision in your remodel and create a result that is both coherent and beautiful. I’m going to be touching on the method I teach in that workshop, the style guide system, in this first best of episode.

But I think that at the time that I recorded it, I hadn’t yet given a clinic or a workshop on that topic, so I wanted to point you to it here, before I dive in, you can find the references to both of these episodes, any images or links, and also direct link to the clinic page at mid mod midwest.com/ 2122 see you there.

If you’re helping to plan A kitchen remodel that never goes out of style, that might not be possible. Your best bet, though, is to make choices for your kitchen and your whole home that connect to the era when the house was built, that build date will never change, and so no choice connected back to it can ever really be wrong. Now all season long, we’ve been talking about kitchens, and I know you have been waiting for the fun part. When do we get to talk about what your new kitchen will look like?

I’ve been making you wait for a reason, because, as an architect, I know that there are so many underlying issues, complexities and connections that make a kitchen remodel really successful. But now today is the day we’re talking about what to put into your new mid-century style kitchen. And one of the best ways to think about going forward is to look back first and take stock of what you’ve got. Now it may be that your kitchen’s been flipped over several times. Even if you have an original kitchen, you may be changing it up due to layout issues, but if we want to think back to the kitchen that your house was originally built with.

So let’s study what that might be. Often mid-century, kitchens were incredibly simple and low budget. They were made with craft and skill and from materials that are hard for us to get our hands on these days, even with a large budget, basically old growth forest timber that they did have in the 50s, then cut down and put in kitchens, and we don’t have it anymore. So hey, think twice before throwing your old kitchen into a dumpster.

But other than that, gorgeous material, these kitchens had simple wooden cabinets built right into the walls, typically, rather than assembled in a factory and delivered and then installed as units. They had Formica countertops with built in backsplashes that only went up a few inches. That sometimes meant there was no actual backsplash, no tile or a simple Formica or plastic layer that was applied to the wall behind cabinets, they also had simple electric appliances, a few basic light fixtures, usually a central surface mount, ceiling light and a light over the kitchen sink, often a strip fluorescent light hidden by a little decorative wooden shade and another over the stove, faucets would be shiny nickel bladed, and likely the cabinet pulls would also be that material.

A simple drop in enamel cast iron sink would complete the look. So making up a kitchen update, we’re probably not trying to recreate that exact look, unless you are a retro renovation style preservationist trying to bring your house back to exactly how it looked when it was built. If so, more power to you.

But for most of us, when we say we want a mid-century kitchen update, what we’re talking about is not a picture of what it looked like in the past, but something that’s going to feel friendly. What you want to avoid is a discordant kitchen remodel that’s either cottage style with shaker details or one that harkens back to an earlier vintage with carved oak and ornate metals. What we’re probably talking about when we look at Pinterest and Instagram for inspiration is a simple, modernist kitchen with minimal details and beautiful materials.

So we’ve talked about the past, but I also like to look to the future. Like I said, a remodel is always going to be most successful if we keep one eye on the era that the house was built, not to copy it, but to make choices that feel compatible with that time period. That means that, on a certain level, the choices you make today can never go out of style. But it’s also a great idea to try to future proof your remodel. While we can’t know what style will flare up and die down over the next 70 years, trendy things will come and go.

Certain elements of good style will remain now you’ll likely not be able to make your remodel truly timeless. Humans evolved as pattern seekers, and just like our eye is drawn to the red berry and greenery food, we easily see and identify style trends of the past. One example of this is, I like to walk through a neighborhood I’ve never been to before and identify the date of the last remodel for each house based on side and color.

Brown almost always means the 80s, beige, 90s to early 2000s and Gray was done in the last five years. This coordinates with other details that you can pull from around the house, and it’s almost universally true, you can do the same thing with kitchens. Follow the color ways of appliances and walls through the decades, baby pink and powder blue in the 1950s bolder shades in the 60s, shifting to more earth tones of harvest gold and classic avocado in the 1970s and likewise, you can follow the wood grain on the cabinets.

A 70s kitchen might have faux plank cabinets a rustic look. An 80s kitchen feels more Victorian inflected. It has dark stained cabinets with fluted molding and hammered brass pulls. The 90s dream kitchen was a reaction to that white on white. And then in the early aughts, everything goes back to oak with stained glass inserts and dark granite countertops. In the 20 teens, we get the shaker cabinets. Please don’t put shaker cabinets in your mid-century kitchen. They just don’t match.

My point is, era based styles are inevitable, so our best bet is to reach back and do something that feels friendly to the original build era of the house. Whenever I think about materiality, I like to return to the concept of a style guide. I make a customized style guide for each of my master plan design projects, pulling together existing materials and details from the client’s home as it stands, along with recommendations for each space based on their taste and our vision for the project.

Each room gets its own material palette and a workbook where the owner can fill in details as they are decided to coordinate flooring, ceiling and wall finishes, cabinet faces, counter material, fixtures, fittings and appliances with each other. While it’s fine to vary the palette from one room to another, it does help to have some cohesive choices repeat throughout the whole house.

This is one of the secrets of getting a designer look on a DIY project. I’ve actually created a free style guide workbook so you can grab and go through this for yourself. If you want to apply these ideas to your kitchen or your whole house remodel, grab that from mid mod midwest.com/style, guide. Or if you want to hear a little bit more about those ideas, pop back to Episode 407. That’s season four, Episode Seven to hear why a cohesive style for your house matters.

Now I do encourage you to make choices that are personal for you. Your kitchen is yours; your home is your own. It should suit you, but one of the most common problems people face in a remodel is an overabundance of options. So let’s narrow it down a little bit. Here are some basic choices you can make when updating your mid-century kitchen that will stand the test of time.

For flooring you’re looking for something durable, practical and as light colored as you feel, you can keep clean. I like marmoleum, cork, wood and tile. These are all strong choices that depend on your lifestyle. For people who drop the dishes, go with cork, which won’t break them, rather than tile, which will if you want to have consistent flooring through the entire house, going with either original wood floors or newly installed, engineered or solid wood floors, is always a good choice for a mid-century house.

Make sure that you don’t let someone talk you into a dark stain color. Basically, a clear coat is all you need on an oak floor for a mid-century house, one of the most expensive parts of the kitchen remodel is the cabinet. So that’s one of the choices that gets made first in this area. I recommend people opt for slab style doors on European style frameless cabinets. Now that isn’t what homeowners were building with in the mid-century era in America, but it aligns well with the modern simplicity of style, and it’s one of the best choices available for most manufacturers and cabinet companies today.

The budget friendly option is to have them finished in white or a color of your choice. Go bold, if that’s for you, but my personal preference is for stained wood finish, and the ideal is a grain matched pattern that continues from one door to another across a run of cabinets. This is a doable way to add beauty and craft to your project, and it’s available both from custom cabinet makers and even from Ikea door replacement companies like semi handmade. This is actually a style that goes right back to the mid-century era.

My own incredibly builder grade cabinets were cut from several single pieces of plywood side by side, so that the grain continues both side to side and up and down across each wall. It’s lovely. Sometimes I just sand in the center of the kitchen and follow the patterns with my eye while I wait for the tea water to boil because watching the pot doesn’t work for wall and ceiling finish. This is a place to play it safe if you feel so inclined. White is never a bad choice, because it’s going to bounce light around and make your kitchen feel brighter.

But this is also a place where you can play with color. Walls are some of the easiest things to change your mind about. You can put on wallpaper or take it down. You can go with bold colors and change your mind later for your tile, probably on the backsplash. This might be another place to be conservative if it doesn’t matter to you. You can never really go wrong with matte, simple and white. But I’ll stand by the advice that if you find a tile you love, go for it. Lean into bold choices if they really matter to you.

Counter surfaces, again, are a place where I recommend simplicity. Nothing looks cleaner than a white counter, and I love solid surface counters for that reason. They’re inexpensive, and if you’re being offered a choice of fluted corners, choose the most simple shape.

You can go for vintage charm with a sparkle lamb laminate counter. Or if you choose white for your cabinets, you might try a wood counter, either a solid slab or a butcher block surface. Now, when you’re thinking about that wood, is it happening in the counter or the cabinets somewhere in your mid-century style kitchen, you need to be seeing wood grain that might be happening simply in the details several cutting boards scattered around the place. It could also happen in exposed shelving.

Wall Mounted shelves instead of closed upper cabinets. Are a trend that I actually really stand behind, because it helps the room feel larger by being able to see all the way to the walls at your eye height. One way or another, you want to coordinate the grains. Ideally, you should be using the same type of wood in the same finish for any wood grain that’s happening in your kitchen. If not, you want to see samples of the two wood grains together so that you can make sure that they work well, that you aren’t getting a green cast to one and a warmer tone to another, but you’re going to clash and sit to Okay.

So just as I encourage you to think about wood grain across different areas of the kitchen, I take the same approach for metal. Now you’re going to have a lot of metal elements in your kitchen, in a bunch of places. They might show up in handles and hinges, door hardware, faucets and other plumbing fixtures, appliances and light fixtures. For more detail on this, check out season four, Episode Seven.

But my general rule of thumb for choosing the metal to go together in one room is to pick two. You don’t have to have everything match itself. And in fact, that’s actually quite a challenge to go across brands. But if you have just two types of metals, say a brass and a matte black, or even plated nickel and bronze, as long as you’re consistent with those two choices, and they show up in more than one place, you’ll have a feeling of cohesiveness. One thing I always avoid in a kitchen remodel is brushed nickel.

That’s a choice that screams early 2000s like nothing else, and will instantly date your kitchen reminder, get samples of everything. There is a reason that interior design accounts on Instagram are. Always showing those beautiful flat lay images with a bit of cabinet face, some tile wall paint chips and a handle or two arranged together with beautiful lighting and a flower. They’re doing that because it catches your eye.

They’re also doing it because a responsible interior designer will get samples of everything to check side by side before approving them. You want to be able to look at these materials together next to each other in the natural light of your own kitchen. It will make a difference. So now that you’ve started to pull together those things and possibly downloaded a style guide and started filling it out for yourself, I want you to think about splitting the difference between trendiness and bold choices and conservative choices that go for longevity in a way that works for you.

Thing is, it depends on how much you care and how long you plan to be in the house. Making a strong choice for any material in your house can cut two ways. It can really personalize the house and make it your own, which is ideal if you’re going to be living in this house for a long time, or it could doom the house to an immediate remodel as soon as you sell it. If that choice is going to be unappealing to someone else. I don’t think people should plan for resale value. So I always advise people to make the boldest choices where they care the most.

But if you’re on the fence, make a conservative choice for more permanent finishes, like tile flooring and cabinets, and be more playful with wall color plumbing fixtures and handles, which can be more easily switched out over time. Where are you going to find all these exciting ideas? I’ve given you some verbal recommendations, but the best way to choose a material is to see it for yourself. So you’re going to be looking on Pinterest, on Instagram, and even with Google image search, although these days, that mostly pops you back to Pinterest.

You’re going to look for ideas in magazines, in homes you visit. Yes, we’re visiting homes again and anywhere else around you in the real world or media. What you want to do is, every time you see a great material, pull it together and store it in one place. You can save your Instagram posts in Instagram or share them to your Pinterest board. You can use a project management software like Trello or Asana to gather links to products, or you can gather them in a spreadsheet or even a ring binder. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how you organize them, just that you stay organized.

Have a way to catch ideas and often specific products and pricing in a way that you’ll be able to refer back to easily. For more advice on this, I recommend you check out season two, Episode Five on organizing your ideas and seven on the power of Pinterest for more planning advice before I go, I just want to remind you that materiality is so important. Putting beautiful materials onto a simple builder, basic layout can transform the way you feel about it.

Likewise, a really ideal, functional layout that was chosen just for your family and lifestyle, executed poorly with the wrong materials, can feel clunky and off in a way that’s hard to identify. In the end, the best advice I can give you for planning an excellent kitchen remodel that will stand the test of time is to keep one eye on the past. All you need to have is some beautiful wood grain, a color or two that you love, and a few well executed details to help you pull those together. Be sure to get your hands on a copy of my free style guide workbook.

Last week was all about starting small. This week is about how you can plan big changes for your home without erasing its mid-century character. By the way, this advice will also work if someone else, or even you in a past life, already came through with a white paint roller, a stack of shiplap panels and Home Depot’s finest collection of brush nickel fixtures, and wiped the mid-century from your 1950s or 60s or 70s home whatever your starting point is. This episode is for people asking, How do I keep my big remodel plans mid-century? My friends? I’ve got the answer for you.

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mile remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to season nine, episode three.

So last week we talked about how to start small, and this week we’re getting into what do you want to do when you dive into big home update plans? And this could be true for you if you just purchased your home, but you know, you bought the house ready to make some major transformations. This could also be you if you’ve been a long time homeowner of a mid-century home.

Some of my one to one design clients have been in their home for 20 or 30 years, raising their children, growing up themselves. If this is you, you may find, as they do, that you’re ready to make changes, even though you’ve already made them. Your budget has changed. Your needs have changed. The life you want to live in. Your house has changed, and I would bet your appreciation of mid-century, modern style has changed since you found your house several decades ago, perhaps when you moved into your house, particularly if it was more than 10 or 15 years ago, you didn’t really see the mid-century era of its construction as a pro, and I hope that now that you do so, for longtime listeners of the podcast, or even if you just discovered it, you’ve probably come here because you think Mid-century Modern is pretty cool.

And I want to help you find out how to bring back mid-century charm to your house that it once had or protect what it’s got going on while building on it and making it even more. If your house has had a lot of its mid-century charm erased, I’ve talked about that problem before in season four, episode three, remodel your MCM time capsule or flip with love. There are pros and cons to each of those situations.

If you have a house where no changes have been made, or if you house where have a house where almost everything has been changed, and I chat about that in the episode, but today I want to talk about four things to keep in mind as you plan a significant remodel, if what you want is for the end result to feel really friendly to your home’s mid-century origins. The most important resource this week is going to be the brand new workbook I’ve created, which will go along with the design cornerstones I’m about to lay out to help you keep your remodel mid-century.

And you can get that directly at mid mod, dash, midwest.com/cornerstones, so these are all design principles that were common in the mid-century era that you can play up to maintain, replace or improve on the mid mod features of your home. In short, they are asymmetry, simple, playful shapes, a practical mix of materials and flow between your spaces. I’m going to give you a little thumbnail sketch of each and then we’ll dive a bit deeper when I talk about asymmetry. Mid-century, home designers were not interested in making tiny castles with perfectly matching Windows flanking each side of the door and carriage lamps on each side of the window and then matching shrubberies on either that they were open to the possibilities of making the most with what they had.

They wanted to really make casual, practical, friendly homes that were more about balance than they were about perfectly book matched elements that goes hand in hand with the simple shapes. Mid-century houses have really simple shapes in a fractal way, since the concept holds true at every scale, large to small, the shape over all of a mid-century house can be very simple, a gable or flat roof, a simple rectangle based floor plan, you can picture it, but at the same time, the details inside the house are also made up of simple shapes.

Ranch trim, that classic door casing and floor baseboard is just a gentle curve with no extra fluted details or multiple ornate components. For a mid-century designer of furniture or houses, squares, rectangles, trapezoids, simple, single curves and starbursts are the watchword. Then the third Cornerstone is that practical mix of materials. Mid-century, houses are made up of a mix of materials that are both natural and sort of futurist. They have plenty of wood in doors, floors, cabinets and siding. Often, they include brick or stonework, but they also delighted in the new mid-century. Folks embraced plastics and enameled metals.

They built their homes with new, standardized building materials, four by eight sheets of plywood, pre grooved land panels, wide swaths of Formica and bold color block tiles that matched to their brand new appliances. They loved to basically have that high low combination. And they weren’t necessarily fixated on luxury so much as they were on practicality, cleanability, durability. This more later.

And then lastly, there’s that fourth crucial feature, the great flow between spaces. Now this shows up most dramatically in sort of high end open plan interiors and the glass wall of windows that flank between a living space and a poolside patio in a California high mid-century house. But even a modest mid-century home has a nook dining room off of an open plan living room or a picture window or a sliding glass door, the high end version of the style literally seems to dissolve the barriers between inside and out and between interior spaces.

But even in a mid-century modest house, you’re going to see these open, flowing elements more so than in a more traditional, earlier era of house, each of these features of a mid-century home exists in your house. I pretty much guarantee it. Now, depending on how much your house has changed since it was constructed. Your mileage may vary, but we’re going to talk about how to dive in on each one of these today, and then next week, I’m going to do a deeper dive day by day all week long. So if this has your attention, sign up to get notified for each day of that mini-series by going to mid mod midwest.com/cornerstones and you’ll get not only the workbook download, but a quick video link every day next week with a helpful design exercise to help you make sure you’re incorporating these elements into your house.

Guys, sign up for this guide. I’m really excited about these design principles. I’m going to be talking about them going on from here, and it’s a perfect lead up to the mid-century design clinic on patios, decks and outdoor spaces. I can’t wait to share all of this with you, but let’s dig a little deeper right now, circling back to the beginning, the first cornerstone that I mentioned was asymmetry.

This leans into the exuberance and the informality of mid-century designs. Note, most of these Cornerstone principles are practical. All when you’re feeling bound by symmetry, you have to make choices about the esthetic of the house that can compromise the way it actually works for the people that live in it. A house that depends on asymmetry for its design can be more functional mid-century design is all about the concept of balance, rather than the concept of symmetry.

And this shows up in the way the front of a mid-century facade works in a typical mid-century Ranch, remember, you’ve got the garage on one end, then the living space is in the middle, and the bedrooms on the far side. The bedrooms might have higher Windows than the living room, where you might have, like, floor to ceiling windows, or at least you’ve got a picture window, and then you’ve got the garage door, which, of course, goes all the way down to the ground.

So if you think about a diagonal line connecting those window garage door lines, it might make the house feel tilted to balance that a mid-century house design will often have a decorative stone or brick knee wall that wraps around the bedroom size to lend visual weight. Again, balance, not symmetry. The bonus concept that goes along with this asymmetry is the horizontal spread of mid-century designs. They liked low furniture to help their eight foot ceilings feel a little bit more high, and they had a mostly single floor approach to their design. In the Midwest, we always have a basement.

You also see the split level. But in general, a mid-century house is oriented more horizontally across its yard, rather than up becoming a tiny little castle for the homeowner. In its landscape, horizontal shapes of houses also tie into the next concept of design, language of simple, playful shapes. So again, that’s the long rectangular house with a simple gable roof. But it’s also the non-dust catching simplicity of basic ranch door trim, the elegance of a kidney bean shaped pool, the oblong of the Noguchi coffee table style, cheerful rectangles, trapezoids.

Think about the mailbox design of vintage mailboxes that kind of leaned out into the mail carrier’s access point and had an interesting color blocked trapezoid shape, the boomerang design of a diner billboard sign. These shapes are really cheerful and future forward. So there were a couple of different reasons why they came into this new idea of simple shapes. Partly, they were trying to set themselves apart from the past. They also didn’t have to make shapes as complex because they were manufacturing them in a different way.

When they were using mass manufactured materials like plywood and veneer. They didn’t need to think about the joinery in the same way that design of furniture in houses from previous areas had done. They also had access to new technology, new materials that allowed them to choose to make things more complexly curved so we could have bent wood, plywood and plastic and metal shapes that were inspired by the booming auto industry.

This was an era where people are talking about optimism, future forward. It was a time of social change, not a perfect time, but the civil rights movement was singing into high gear. Women’s issues were shifting. Class structures were more fluid. The middle class was growing, and all of that was reflected in design. This was the Space Age. People wanted their furniture and their houses to look fresh and new, so they added in new angles, new colors and new shapes. If you think about the sort of classic motel of the mid-century era that has all of the pieces, it’s a long, low form. It has sort of bright color blocked simple furniture inside of it, and it has that weird oblong, asymmetrical metal and plastic sign out front calling people in and telling them about the vacancy.

The third cornerstone, in the mid-century, modern era, there is a love of gorgeous, organic materials that were found in the predecessing craftsman style, glowing warm wood. Grain is all over the mid-century era, unpainted stone and brick. You see these things, but they’re not precious about it. Practical. Mid-century designers were just as happy to use plywood as they were to use solid wood, and they were delighted to incorporate new plastics, form, mica, glass, baked enamel, metal surfaces that would be easy to clean.

This practicality about materials extends to texture as well, rather than a high gloss sheen on wood grain, mid-century surfaces were often matte, so this offers less potential for fingerprints and less requirement for cleaning, and it ties in with the weird ambivalence in the mid-century era about household labor, if you look into mid-century advertising, and we talked about this in that interview I did with Sarah Archer in the kitchen Season, Episode 502, we talked about how in the advertising you see from the era everything is about labor saving devices and simple to clean this and lasts forever that.

And yet, nearly all of the ads from that time cast the woman of the household in a row of homemaker who basically had nothing else to do but keep her households thick and span so yeah, I love this concept of practicality. It was the time right after World War Two, we were just out of a depression, just over a war, it was about rebuilding. Building, getting up to speed, making hay while the sun shone.

And the goal of the mid-century house was to get everyone their own house, not to have the best house, not to have the fanciest house, not to have the most luxurious house, but to have everyone have a house and it had to be made out of available materials. So they aimed for efficiency. They built small houses, builder grade materials. Rather than advertising things as luxurious or high end, they advertise them as being durable and easy to clean.

That’s just something that I find really charming about the mid surgery era, and something that we should maybe set our sights back on. That if our choices for the finished materials we choose in our house should last 70 years and be easy to clean, we would make different choices than you’ll see on HGTV.

The fourth cornerstone of a mid modern remodel is flow between spaces.

Now most obviously this is going to be the flow between inside and outside spaces. And this idea had been sort of brewing for a while. When we get to the mid-century, moment, we can point back to Frank Lloyd Wright with his pushing the boundaries of what contemporary building technology was up for by creating those zero corner structure windows that he was literally sticking together with wood with tree sap for a while there, by the way, that is not a solid building technology, but it was also because of The way that the early ranch style houses came out of California.

Cliff may widely regarded as the father of the modern ranch house, and he’s got a fun bio I’ve talked about on the show before, not actually trained as an architect. He was a furniture designer who took inspiration from his family’s ranch style house, by which I mean house on a cattle ranch, to design houses that would suit the furniture he had created. He and then all of the California modernist designers that came around his era were separating the structure of the house from the exterior walls of the house and also extending the psychological boundary of the house beyond its walls by having a deeper eave, such that as you stand by a window in the rain, you look out and it feels like the boundary of your domain isn’t the window itself, but the drop line of rain that’s happening outside.

Or even as you stand outside on a nice day, that your deck, which looks right into big picture windows into your living room, might actually be more part of the house than it is part of the yard, creating more flow between the inside and outside spaces in your house can not only help you expand a small space and turn it into a larger one without an addition, but also turn up that feeling of mid-century design at this point, if you’ve grabbed the workbook, you know that I’m going to be asking you to identify where each of these features shows up in your house, and remember at the top I said each of these cornerstones is pretty much guaranteed to exist in your home.

I stand by that even if you have a house that’s been completely flipped, we can find something to build on. And even if you have what retro renovation calls a mid-century modest house, you still have these cornerstones. And then you can play them up to greater effect, all of these ideas connect together. The horizontal asymmetrical lines help blur the boundaries between inside and out the materiality that works best for this era. That Slim Line Roman brick, for example, also further emphasizes horizontal design, and then the simple practicality of materials ties in with the simple shapes that are used in the forms of mid-century design. It all goes hand in hand.

So if you want to think a little bit more about how to incorporate these ideas into your home update plans, then the fifth secret Cornerstone is to take time to think about design while you plan your home update and to do that, you use my very favorite system, the Master Plan method.

When you go through the steps of dreaming, discovering, distilling, drafting and developing your master plan, you’ll remember to incorporate these elements into your home, and you won’t fall into the trap of planning a great remodel for your house, to change it, to update it, and then find that when you’re done you’ve changed it, and update it in such a way that it’s no longer mid-century, that’s the question from the top of the episode.

How can you plan a big update without losing your mid-century character? And the answer is, by taking the time to master plan a great remodel and focusing on these four cornerstones.

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