Remodeling a (mostly) Mid-Century Gem

44 min readIs your house a (mostly) mid-century gem? The “mostly” means that your house that has some really great, intact mid-century features…and then an area or two where a maintenance failure or unfortunate remodel has wreaked havoc on the charm. 

Is your house a mostly mid-century gem?

And by “mostly” I mean that your house that has some really great, intact MCM features … but there’s a room or three where someone made a few bad calls.  Now you’re left holding the bag on a sweet place with a super tired kitchen, a really strange bathroom or even a structural issue created by the previous owners.  

I see houses like this all the time!

Full of wonderful, intact details set against the backdrop of an over large kitchen or unfortunate addition. And the good news is they are perfectly suited to the master plan process.   

While I love working on everything from grandparent time capsule houses to places that have experienced a brutal flip and need to be entirely hauled back from the brink … the (mostly) charming house is one of our most common projects.

Today, lets take a spin through three recent Mid Mod Midwest master plan projects. I’ll share some fun history, common design challenges and my favorite approaches to upgrading mid-century homes that are in (mostly) great shape. With a big focus on putting back the appropriate mid-century materials in those not-so-great spots.

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • Why homes with just a few problem areas need a master plan, too.  
  • How to approach right sizing a space post remuddle. 
  • Where to consider if “decorative” mcm elements might be much more. 

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify | YouTube

We’ll cover right sizing your kitchen, things to think about when enclosing a sunroom, and what not to do when looking at parts of your home’s original mid-century design that seem decorative, but might be structural.

Undoing Unfortunate Kitchen and Primary Suite Updates

Right-sizing a Wrongheaded Kitchen Remodel

Adjusting a Less Than Great Kitchen Addition

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

If you have a house that is mostly mid-century but has one or two or three rooms that have been well-meaningly modified or maybe brutally attacked by flippers, this episode is for you. I’m taking a spin back through three recent Mid Mod Midwest master plan projects to share some fun history, some common design challenges and some of my favorite approaches to upgrading the layout of a mid-century kitchen or Owner’s Suite, while putting back the appropriate mid-century materials along the way.

I’m going to talk about right sizing your kitchen. Things to think about when enclosing a sunroom, and what not to do when looking at parts of your home’s original mid-century design that seem decorative but might be structural. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating your 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 2113.

Now, before we get into these three projects. And I actually didn’t. I didn’t mean to do a project roundup that turns into a sales pitch, but I just wanted to tell you that if you are thinking about getting in touch with us about a mid-century master plan, if this episode inspires you, for example, there are two things that you probably want to factor into your planning process.

The first is that our office is going to be closed for a week in July for our regular summer shutdown. This gives everyone on the team a little bit of chance to reset, for people to plan longer vacations around this time, and just generally, to enjoy the fact that we are alive in the summer. So we will be completely closed, taking no meetings and having no emails answered the week of the 21st the 25th of July, and will be a little less available for meetings in the week before and after that as well.

So if you are thinking about reaching out to start the process of working with us, which just begins with a simple phone call, you’ll fill in a small form on our website to apply to work with us. Tell me a little bit about your mid-century house and your plans for it. What state it’s in, is it a time capsule? Has it been remodeled? What’s going on there? And then we’ll schedule an appointment for you and I to talk about what’s possible for your home and how our process might help you.

Anyway, if you want to get one of those calls onto the calendar, I recommend you reach out sooner rather than later, so you don’t get stuck in the scheduling crunch of our office closure time. The other thing is that if you’re thinking that now might be a good moment to really put your plans in place and start moving forward on a remodel, you’re not alone. Over the last several years, I have noticed that people really start to reach out to us in July and build up into August.

We tend to get quite booked out through the fall. I think there’s something about that back to school energy the summer, wrapping up, getting into summer and having a sense of more spaciousness and a little bit more recreation and freedom. Kids being out of school and then looking forward and noticing that life is about to firm up again, gets people thinking about taking action on their remodel plans.

It also makes sense that we are coming past the halfway point of the year, and certainly design takes a little bit of time. Our process does, and so now is a great time to start thinking about plans. You might be able to do one or two small projects, particularly if they’re DIY, based on a master plan we designed for you this late summer or early fall, and then you can get into things before the end of the year.

But if you’re planning to have work done next year, now is the right time to put your planning ducks in a row so you can start talking to contractors and get onto their schedule for the year to come. All of this is to say, if you’re feeling like you might be one of those people, why not be earlier into our design queue rather than later. We do tend to take our master plan project on a first signed, first served basis.

Sometimes there is urgency that allows us to push things forward a little bit, and sometimes our clients sign in a hurry and then have life come up and need to take a break. But if you’d like to get your place secured in our design queue, I’d like to speak to you about your mid-century home as soon as you can. So reach out, check out our website, midmod-midwest.com, and the work with us page to find out more about our process, as you’ll be hearing a little bit more about our design thinking today.

Rather than pointing you towards one specific mid-century design resource on this week’s episode, I’m just going to use this as an opportunity to say that the Master Plan method works, that avoiding Master Plan thinking and jumping in on a small project first generally has a cost in terms of other opportunities, lost, esthetic choices not made to their maximum effect, and any time you take even a little bit of time to apply the Master Plan, process of dreaming about what’s important to you, discovering what’s going on in the house, completely distilling what mid-century style will best suit your taste and the house that you have, drafting a couple of different options.

And you’re going to hear me talk about 123, options in all of the projects I discussed today, and then developing a master. Plan that is perfectly suited to your budget, your availability and the scale of change you want to make in your house, possibly even breaking things into phases. Is such a powerful way to approach I don’t quite like what’s going on in my house. I know I need to change something, but I’m not sure quite what it is. Such a more effective way than picking up the phone and calling the first contractor on the phone book to come over and give you the 2025 special, which will be dated, oh, I would guess by 2030 My goodness, that feels like a long way away when I say 2030 but it is five years from now, and you do not want to plan a remodel that lasts you five years before it goes off trend.

So I think my best advice to anyone to everyone is you don’t need to hire me. You don’t need to become a ready to remodel student. You can get a lot from just listening to these podcast episodes, but really, if you do nothing else, just take the time to ask yourself, What’s important to you? Learn a little more about your house and make choices that are in line with the mid-century materiality that your house already has, or once did have, and you will be infinitely better off in your remodel plans. Best of luck mid model remodeler.

One thing we always fall behind on while I’m churning out cheerful podcast topics, answering questions from my students and clients, shepherding along the journeys of our ready to remodel program and creating master plans for our one to one clients is remembering to publish case studies and talk about the recent projects that we have done. This ends up as the last item on my to do list every time I’d like to put it above things like business paperwork and tax documentations.

But those things can’t be skipped, and apparently the case studies can. I really thought I was not that far behind. And then I looked and found that a couple of the recent projects, recent in quotation marks on our website, are from 2022 so anyway, today I thought I would remedy that a little bit by pairing a couple of projects with a podcast topic and sharing some of the lessons that I can pull from those recent projects that may apply more generally to you, to the kind of house you have, or even if you don’t have this kind of house, to give you some inspiration for how to bring the details that these projects had into your own place.

So the pieces the two projects that I’ve chosen today fit together in my head, because they both sprang for homes that were already quite lovely mid-century and interesting to begin with. And so our goal as designers was to match or restore the charm. Essentially, some parts of the house had not been touched and were as they were originally built, which was great, because it gave us some sort of design material to work from, and other parts had been, let’s say, modified, one might say attacked in the intervening decades.

Now, if this isn’t you, if you don’t have a time capsule house in any way, shape or form, if you don’t have any original features left in your house, or if your original mid-century features are quite modest, unlike the quite remarkable, charming features on the two houses I’m going to discuss today, you can pull some inspiration from the original features that these houses have. There’s no reason not to add back in mid-century charm that your house never had in the first place.

But if you are in a situation where you’ve got a house that has some great, intact mid-century features, and then other parts of the house that either have a maintenance failure or have been remodeled in the past and aren’t working anymore. A master plan is a very safe move for you, a very correct choice to make, because if you just come in and start a new remodel on top of the previous one, you fall into the risk of not only not bringing back the House to its time capsule charm to get that timeless effect.

Whether or not you’re creating a museum piece, even if you’re updating, you want to be able to identify and lean into the right materials from the original house, but you could even go back and lose more original features, if you’re not cautious. So these two houses were both lovely projects with really charming clients as well as charming houses.

Honestly, though I shouldn’t brag about two specific clients, we get really lucky here at Mid Mod Midwest, the people that come to us with mid-century harnesses that they want to work on, the people who choose us are nearly universally really, really lovely people to work with and just a joy to bring into our mad mod remodel community.

Okay, so let me I’m going to do these houses one at a time, and kind of cross pollinate with ideas, recommendations, things you might take away yourself. The first project is in Central Indiana. Really quite a gorgeous house to begin with and came with a fascinating pedigree. This isn’t a cliff may or an Eichler, not in Central Indiana anyway, but it actually was designed by an architect, and it was designed by one person within a local Indiana based architecture firm, who happened to be the only woman that worked there in the era.

Uh, the new owners of the house had had a lot of fun doing some deep dives into the history, asking around, talking to the neighbors, eventually tracking down this firm and finding out some background on this architect, who had, in her broader career, done a lot of work on larger structure houses. She had done, um, sort of Chicago. Chicago based high raise structure construction. And so she took some of the maybe less residential design tips and tricks that she had developed in her other career, in her in her broader career, and applied them to this house.

For example. It’s a post and beam structure, and in the spacing between each of the beams in the living area, she had put in big framed in double pane glass units, floor to ceiling, post to post that put in an array three in a row, really bring the outside and really connect the house to its pool deck patio, which is right outside The post and beam structure in general was very well executed. The main social part of the house had a big central beam running down the middle with a couple of columns supporting it and exposed joist lines running down. So you could also see the sort of roof structure coming down and hitting the two exterior wall beam lines.

Rather than them being mostly framed two by four. They were mostly also post and beam exterior walls, which allowed for some closed up panels for the proper diaphragm effect to keep the house from just tipping over, like a house made out of popsicle sticks, but really a lot of open space and a lot of glass. Now this wouldn’t be unusual if the house had built in California, but it is pretty rare and exciting to be found in a Midwestern house.

So I was so delighted to find this house in this spot. She’d also done something really lovely and delicate with that lofty, full exposed ceiling social area at the center of the house, but it was separated from the entry as you come in from the garage, had a little bit of a lower ceiling area and a soffit line that ran around the exterior walls to kind of create an edge, a datum line that wrapped around the entry area, creating some lower ceiling spaces and some pop up exposed the compression and release effect that We love so much in mid-century houses.

And then as you went down the central hallway to the bedroom wing, it had an eight foot drop ceiling. But it didn’t just start harshly as you walk between walls into that hallway area, the ceiling came out beyond the outer edge of the bedroom walls and created, again, a little shelf which could be used for lighting also sort of just softened that distinction between social area and bedroom area.

And then once you went into the bedroom spaces, the hallway at eight feet didn’t stop as you walk into the bedrooms, but that eight foot datum line followed you into the bedrooms a couple more feet, creating a logical spot, a little nook for built ins to be put and then as you came further into the room, suddenly you popped up under a higher ceiling, which sort of welcomed you into a loftier space.

Really. The whole place was just so well put together. It made it sadder in many ways, that the house had been medium, aggressively flipped totally new kitchen scraped in a large, sort of clunky addition off the back, turning what had been a patio into a den and then a sort of a bedroom addition off behind the garage, and quite a bit of the original woodwork had been painted white. This makes me sad.

Also, I’m very sad we didn’t have the original floor plans for this house, because I would have loved to see both some built in elevation drawings. Maybe a cross section would have been so much fun, and I would have been fascinated to find out the original kitchen layout. I strongly suspect that the original kitchen was built to be a little more walled off, cut off from the main house, and the new kitchen had certainly opened up view lines to the new space.

The new kitchen, I would guess, probably early, 2000s judging by the woodwork, and had a couple of flaws. The first one being that it was constructed from cabinets in a wood grain stain and door pattern that didn’t match anything else in the house, with those lightly ornate frame door panels just completely out of period, but also the layout was a big empty G shape, which the new owners could tell at a literal glance, was not going to work well for them.

Now, if that doesn’t immediately give you a picture of this, we often refer to the layouts of kitchen floor plans with letters an L shaped kitchen has cabinets along two walls touching each other in a corner to make an L, A, C or A, U, sometimes has walls along three sides of a room, or sometimes along two sides, and then there’s a wall of Peninsula, or a row of cabinet peninsula that comes out from the walls or a G is often touching two or three walls in a room and has two or one Peninsula elements coming out to come together, to sort of create an almost full enclosure that you walk through, not a doorway to get into, but into a small door sized opening between countertop cabinets.

In this case, it was even more illogical. There was an L shaped space of cabinets touching the wall, and then those two peninsulas coming out to meet at a very small walk through opening, cutting off easy flow between inside the kitchen and outside the kitchen.

Then the space inside the kitchen was quite large, which meant that the cook stuck in there, had to take multiple steps to walk between various parts of the kitchen and the peninsula segment that separated the kitchen from the dining area felt like the real waste of space, a long countertop far from all of the working surfaces, close to the refrigerator, cooktop, sink, so it would inevitably kind of become not kitchen space so much as a flat surface asking to be cluttered up with paperwork or objects for the rest of the house. In any case, we had plenty of scope for the imagination to come in and improve on this space, particularly in the kitchen area, but throughout the house and also into the bedroom wing.

One further challenge of this house, before I get into solutions, was that at the same time as the kitchen remodel, someone had extended the footprint of the house and what had been a simple flow, sort of from the kitchen down a little mudroom hallway out onto a back patio and pool deck had become elongated into a path that went out into a rec room made from the original patio, and then beyond A sort of chunky, ugly set of modern guest bedrooms were attached down there.

This is a scenario we encounter quite a lot, and might feel familiar to you too, if your house has been not just remodeled on the inside, but added on to in the intervening decades since its original construction. It’s very common to make what I universally consider to be kind of a remodeling mistake, which is to build covered spaces and then enclose them. And then build covered spaces and then enclose them kind of sequentially.

It can lead to a kitchen that once had a window, maybe even sliding doors that look out at a backyard, and then someone put a covered space out beyond the kitchen. So far, so good. Then they enclose that covered space into a three season room. Then maybe they turn that three season room into a living room, and suddenly we have a kitchen that is, instead of having bright window walls facing out onto the yard, it’s cut off, landlocked on the inside of the house.

And so it can become dark, can feel cut off. It can feel like there’s a long, complicated pathway to get out, say, to a patio where you might want to do cooking on a grill. In this particular case, extending that pathway land, locking the kitchen didn’t create darkness. In fact, it had a very lovely skylight in it, but it did really extend an awkward pathway to get from the kitchen to the place where any out time outside eating time would be spent, where poolside meals would be eaten.

And certainly, I think we needed to think about how to smooth out that pathway. The one really helpful decision that the previous remodelers had made was, rather than modifying, I think they would have needed to wreck the existing bedrooms with those lovely lower ceiling light shelves that then turn into raised, exposed ceiling structure pieces so good, rather than modifying those, they just built a new bedroom wing onto the back of the house. This was part of the process of extending the hallway and closing patios and cutting off the house from its pool, but it did create basically a space that nobody liked at all, that had no original, mid-century bona fide days.

That meant we could create a blank slate for the owners to build a new owner suite of their dreams and then preserve the charm and integrity of the original bedroom wing on the other side of the house for office and very private guest room space. I would have been so sad to be asked to reconceive those bedrooms because they were so fascinating and interesting, I feel like leaving them in place was a big win.

So let’s talk about some of the choices that we did suggest for our clients. And if you’re curious about any of these, please pop over to the show notes page, where we will have comparative floor plans and perspective views of a bunch of the different design ideas that we considered here in the first kitchen change scheme, we always proposed making the lightest or the smallest possible changes.

So we kept in place the little powder bathroom that had been right by the kitchen and the existing somewhat awkward hallway right by the top of the stairs down to the partial basement. But we did change out immediately that G shaped kitchen for an island layout that had a big generalist central workspace that would make space for there to be one or two people, kind of working in a kitchen zone, close to the cooktop, close to the sink, close to the refrigerator.

They could work around each other on that side, and for other people to be flowing around the house, coming in from the garage. Are setting things down and picking them up to move further into the house, in the kitchen, but in a less cooking zone, part of the kitchen. We preserved the little powder room that had been in the kitchen in its existing location, but we moved the doorway from facing right into the kitchen area around to facing into the little hallway passage that took you out towards the patio deck in our second more intense version, we reoriented the island, and we actually closed off.

We moved the entry door from the garage down a little way so that we could create an enclosed mudroom, a place to contain clutter, maybe even an airlock. Indiana doesn’t get that extreme weather, but a place to keep cold drafts from flowing right into the kitchen and also to break up the line of sight from the garage door right down into the main part of the house.

At the same time, we created kind of a connection between a kitchen cooking area, again with an island orientation, and a cooktop on the island that extended right on down and became a sort of an eat in kitchen booth slash dining area that really sort of bridges the gap between the kitchen, cooking area and the more dressy, slightly more generous living area that goes off beyond with space for the baby grand piano and the pool views being connected to that sitting eating area.

In that version, we tried a different arrangement of cabinets, and we did a detail that I love for big, high ceilinged areas, where we actually, because we’d put the cooktop into the island, we suspended an upper cabinet with slider doors, just a shallow one, where you could put a few handy spice rack type things, common pots, maybe the popcorn, air popper would all be up there in that suspended overhead rack, and also it conceals the base of the ductwork for the exhaust fan for the cooktop, and then gives sort of it doesn’t make it invisible by any means, but it gives some visual cover to the duct for the exhaust hood going up to the roof in that design.

So pop over and check out this detail in the visuals for this episode. You can find those show notes at mid mod midwest.com/ 2113 and I think you’ll have a lot of fun flipping through these. So then the third scheme we created kind of a laundry room, butler’s pantry, that much more thoroughly enclosed that hallway that transitions from the kitchen out to the patio deck, but we also opened up a new pathway so you could go straight from the living room out around to the patio without having to come back through the kitchen and then down along tunnel style hallway. In this case, we sort of leaned into the built in aspect.

We borrowed, actually some square feet back from the garage, because it’s a happened to be a very generous sized garage with an added on garage beyond it, and allowed us to get a very flat faced built in, with the refrigerator recessed and sort of pantry cabinets all snugged flatly into the wall.

And that allowed us to have a really open area, nothing over a big, generous island and very little upper cabinets over the other counter surfaces that face the wall, which really sort of maximizes the open space feeling of a kitchen. This is it’s not something I would do in a pure time capsule house kitchen remodel, but this being always an architect design, kind of reaching enthusiastic, kind of an ambitious modern, a modern mid-century house. We were able to choose some more modern, uh, sleeked up, sort of maybe or more European cabinet designs for this kitchen remodel. So pop on over to the show notes and have a look at those three options.

I always find it really interesting to think about how small, medium, large changes can stack up against each other. And in the end, of course, our clients chose a bit of a mix and match, choosing the features of each kitchen layout. Then in the way they reached out to the dining room, the way they met the entry, the way they created good mud room space coming in from the garage to suit their exact needs once they’d thought about it and once, they’d seen it sketched out into perspectives.

This episode is turning out to be mostly about kitchens, but I’ll just touch on what we suggested for our owner suite, because again, we were taking what had been an addition from probably the 90s, a boxy, rectangular space tucked off behind the garage, and scraping it clean, essentially, we were able to turn what had been two bedrooms and a really awkward shaped small bathroom into a very generous, open, flowing bedroom dressing area owner’s bathroom of this couple’s dreams, and because they live alone in the house, we were able to sort of dispense with some of the more doored delineations and experiment with layouts that were more or less open to each other and to the house beyond this sort of separate wing effect means that there’s built in privacy already.

So in one scheme, we had a setup that was meant to be a little island unto itself. You walk in. In, you can see down a hallway to a bedroom, past an open dressing room, but the bathroom itself is closed off, and there’s a little separate laundry area. In the second scheme, you walk straight in, and you can see immediately out over a little knee wall, headboard above the bed, beyond it, and to Windows outside.

And then we placed the bathroom at the end of this arrangement with a tub in front of a big giant, actually one of those repurposed six foot wide, seven foot high, fixed glass windowpanes, we were going to take one out to put inside our doors in the living area. So we repurposed and relocated it into this bathroom area within a privacy wall beyond it, so you could bathe in glorious splendor looking outside while also knowing no one else could look inside at you.

And in the third scheme, we actually created a space that became private beyond the access to the bathroom. So it’s that a little toilet compartment that was for the owner’s bathroom could also be treated like a tiny powder room and be a handy place for poolside guests to come in and use a bathroom. This was because we ended up taking the toilet out of where it had been in the butler’s pantry area in order to do other things in that space.

So there’s always a matter of sort of moving design elements around the house. Sometimes they’re staying together, sometimes moving all the bedroom and bathroom features together, and they’re completely distinct from the kitchen layout. But in this case, we needed to make a choice in the kitchen to sacrifice a bathroom. So we found a way to build access to a relatively private but still shareable powder bathroom in the owner suite footprint.

This kind of tradeoff is what you get when you might do a project, one area at a time, kitchen this year, bathrooms next year, bedrooms, additions beyond but you plan it all out at once, so you know where you’re going to make your sacrifices and have your gains. And that kind of thing can really be the superpower of the master plan method.

The second house I want to talk to you about that fits under this umbrella of built with incredible mid-century charm to begin with, then kind of damaged in a previous remodel, and our mandate coming back in with our mid surgery master plan, was to not fix anything that wasn’t broken, but to repair the losses, the mistakes of previous remodels, and also to tune the house a little bit more to the specific needs of the new owners.

So in the case of that first house, what had happened in the remodel was, I think the previous owners had made some well-meaning, but completely misguided choices to update in their in their opinion, the house to their own taste, probably just using the surfaces of a local contractor who offered them a lot of this is the standard thing we do right now, design suggestions.

They didn’t think about the original house, but it was clearly designed for the people who are going to live there. This second house I’m going to talk about had been attacked by flippers. The choices they made were noticeably cheap, oriented towards intense trends. And how can I put this kindly, more creative than successful? In this case, we were lucky enough to have access to the original floor plans, which is always a delight.

So I could see that the original footprint was unusually large and empty for a mid-century kitchen. It was actually 15 feet across from the kitchen sink wall to the opposite wall where the refrigerator and freezer were meant to be built in, with nothing drawn in the middle. I have a feeling the original owners might have had a piece of furniture built in, piece of furniture, butcher block counter rather, although there is also a table drawn on the plan in a different area. So maybe it was just maybe the owners requested a very, very spacious kitchen.

One thing we do know about the original owners, the builders of this house, is that they were huge into amateur theatricals. That means they were always putting on plays in their basement. So some of these pieces were still intact. They had built backdrops and sets for a number of different, I don’t know, specific plays or just for multi-functional uses. As I was measuring the house, I always start in the basement to sort of get a sense of the footprint.

And they were all of these different sort of set dressing, a fireplace scene, a sort of a Greek columns with flowers painted on the wall, trampolet style, a living room set. And then there were also several places where there was just a wall blanking off nothing in the basement, maybe making a corner where there’s a place where an actor could run around behind that wall and come out in a different area. I think they must have just had people take their chairs and orient them to the various bit of set that was in in play at that moment. In any case, it gives me the sense that the original owners might have been big host people.

They might have loved to have friends over, to have to have a host of guests just kind of all standing around. And that can lend itself to a bigger, blanker kitchen footprint. In any case, what the flippers had chosen to do was to grab a bunch of previously used cabinets from like a Habitat for Humanity ReStore type of deal, or maybe they found them in an estate sale, hard to say, and they fit them somewhat awkwardly into the new space.

They lined one wall with base cabinets so far so good but then put in upper cabinets so low over them that there was basically no space to actually work. All you could do was set dishes or appliances or paperwork along those base cabinets. They weren’t a working surface. There was a little bit of work surface, only a very little on either side of the sink. And then they had taken two individual base cabinet units, you know, your standard two foot deep depth, and they were only three feet wide. One of them was a three foot wide cook top set into it.

And so it was just three feet wide, and the entire three feet was cooktop. There was no place on either side of the cooking surface to put down anything, a pot, a spatula, nothing, because it was the other outer edges of the island. And then opposite they’d put another three foot wide piece, another base cabinet with some drawers in it. And I think there was a little overhang and a space for two stools.

But it really was the most unsuccessful design or addition of an island that I’ve seen in a flipper remodel. And also, they had so much room to do a bigger job, to put in more of a countertop, even over just that amount of island box cabinet. Because again, it was a very, very large kitchen. I was I was really quite baffled by how it wasn’t working. It was particularly unsuccessful for the new clients because they were shared cook household. They really, they loved to do elaborate cooking.

They loved to do prep of vegetables they had harvested in their garden. They wanted a lot of chopping and prepping space, and they both wanted to be working in the space at the same time. This was a terribly unsuccessful kitchen to do that in, despite the fact that it was actually quite a large and generous kitchen. And again, that oddity of the original house, that it was 15 feet from one from the sink wall to the refrigerator wall meant you had to go on quite a trek to get from the sink to the refrigerator. And just imagine, anytime you’re trying to sort of pour some water into a pitcher and then put it back in the fridge. That’s making quite a journey to make that happen.

The flippers had made a few other changes to the house, including they knocked out the divider planter that had once separated the sunken sunroom from the living area. And in the process of taking out that planter, they clearly knocked out a central post which had been supporting the big, wide opening between those two spaces. I don’t know what was on their mind. Maybe they maybe the planter was water damaged.

Maybe they just didn’t get it. But in taking out that post, they started a chain reaction to quite a dramatic problem, the central support that was holding up, not just the roof line between those spaces, but actually a change in roof height, with clear story windows above, started to sag, and this created some roof water pooling issues, which eventually became a leak. This is the first precipitating event that got my client started on making changes to the house and eventually getting in contact with me, but unfortunately, it contains a small object lesson in what you can and can’t win when you do things out of order.

From a master plan perspective, from my client’s perspective, they did everything in the order of necessity and urgency. First, they called in a contractor who called in an engineer who solved their roof leak problem. Then they got in touch with me, and the object lesson in this situation is, had they called in mid mod Midwest before they addressed that roof leakage problem, I would have suggested immediately that we pop in a column in the middle of that span. Again. In fact, we suggested that anyway, because esthetically, it was the right thing to do.

I wanted to restore that planter and create not a complete separation between the sunroom and the dining room, but more of a purposeful division of the two spaces, also, because there was a step down create a little more safety to make an obvious distinction in the two different floor heights. But the engineer who was called in long before I was on the scene in the manner of engineers assumed they would want to keep the full wide opening.

So he or she did the math and specified a deeper, and therefore stronger beam to span that entire space. This was just in the process of being installed when I came onto the project, so it was too late to change it. But if anyone had asked me, I would have noted that we didn’t need a bigger, stronger, deeper beam. We just needed to support the load in the middle, which would have required a lighter, smaller beam.

Now, this story has a happy ending. The whole house is going to look gorgeous. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the scenario, but there was a small design cost. I mean, there’s not No there’s not no cost to installing a super heavy beam. So there’s a. Dollar cost there, and also the design cost is that originally, the flat, lower ceiling of the sunroom came right up to the border with the living room and then turned upwards into a window wall of clear story which popped up to catch the elevated shed living room roof pop over again to the show notes page to see a sketch of how lovely this space actually is.

But the contrast was slightly better emphasized before we put in that deeper beam, which pops down and creates a header effect across that opening. It’s ever so slightly less elegant. Now, no one who enters the space today is ever going to think about what it once was. They’ll assume that beam was absolutely necessary, possibly original to the house, but I know it didn’t need to be there, and that kind of potential is the unsung hero of the master plan process.

It’s why I recommend people start from their master plan even before they can afford to do anything, even if you’re in anything other than a dire maintenance emergency, like active water dripping in a roof. So these clients may have made the most appropriate choice for themselves, but if there is anything less dire than a drippy roof, which should be attended to as soon as possible, I think it’s best to consider all the potential changes you want to make and loop in the esthetic to your even practical maintenance structural replacement issues, because there’s often a win, win scenario that can be derived from this kind of remodel.

And having A mid-century perspective added in to what feel like nuts and bolts. Issues like the roof is leaking and we need a beam to support a load can really change the game. Salvaging the mid-century esthetic and perhaps even saving the cost of a heavier, more significant beam, is always potential. But specialists, engineers, electricians, even kitchen designers, who are called in to solve one small part of a greater project will work the problem that is set in front of them, which, by the way, is exactly what they ought to do.

If you walk a structural engineer into a space, show them a wide open span and ask them what size of beam will carry its load, they’ll tell you the answer correctly, even if they walked in and thought, I don’t know, a column in the middle would make this all smaller and cheaper, they probably wouldn’t say that, because that’s not the question they were asked to address.

And in general, engineers have been trained both by their background and experience and by the contractors and designers they work with, not to offer design suggestions in addition to problem solving anyway, this is all a little diversion from the greater charm of this house and the things I want to talk about next, but I thought it was a useful moment to pick out and talk about in terms of why it’s so important, so powerful to start from a master plan right from the beginning, because it may be that that Master Plan thinking can win you an esthetic improvement, or even a cost or workflow improvement over the course of everything you’re going to do.

Now I also just wanted to sing the phrases of this house. This particular layout was so charming, and I was so delighted to be called in to view this house in person and do its field measure and documentation, because even having seen the photos and the floor plans before I got there, I couldn’t quite understand just how cute and charming it was, because it has a layout. If you pop over to the show notes page and check out its original floor plan, slightly more complex than a simple rectangle, each of the three bedrooms has an outside corner access, so each of those bedrooms has the opportunity to have generous windows on two different walls, even though they’re mostly in line with each other.

The back two are set out slightly further, and then there’s a step back in, and there’s another outer corner for the little office guest bedroom, which is going to float so sweetly off the main space. It’s gonna be a perfect music room with a phonograph and extensive record collection always on display. Then the owner’s bedroom beside it was always generously sized enough to have a nook for a piano, and just like a lovely view out stunning peeks into the backyard, into the privacy hedge that separates them from the neighbor’s house.

And then there’s also a nice guest project room that, again, faces right out into their backyard and garden and future hot tub location, the social center of the house, the living room and kitchen are popped up to an elevated slam ceiling, which just makes you want to stay in that space with gorgeous clerestory windows letting in outer brightness. This is actually just the opposite of I was talking about when you put on too many additions and you land lock your kitchen, then it’s a dark space, even though this living room, dining room space and kitchen, the kitchen has windows around the exterior, but the living room and dining room have no exterior windows directly.

But they both share space with the sunroom beyond, and they have those upper clerestory windows so they feel light, bright and airy. Then lower ceiling spaces at the entry side that opens up into that living area, and then the kitchen also has a little soffit that runs around it, and a lower ceiling space over its dining area at the end really help prevent the space from having a cavernous, great room effect and keep it COVID. Easy and specific.

So our charge was to make the most of all of that, to really create a functional teamwork based kitchen with wonderful flow, and then also add in a kind of a butler’s pantry in each scenario with great access to the garden. So I recommend that if you possibly can, either now or later, pop over to the show notes page and have a look at the three schemes in floor plan and prospective sketches that we drew for this house. I’ll sort of describe a couple of the different scenarios that we considered as we went through three schemes for this kitchen. In the first kitchen layout, we stayed pretty close to what the original concept had been.

The refrigerator was on the opposite side where it was both in the flipper remodel and the original footprint. We left the kitchen sink and dishwasher in place, and the built in, bricked in oven stayed consistent through two schemes, but we put in a larger island in the center.

Now I love putting in a big island, although in most mid-century kitchen updates, I don’t get the opportunity to do that because most mid-century kitchen footprints are smaller than the owners want, not larger. But in this case, jumping up the size of the island was a huge improvement over what the previous little flipper island had been, because it made enough space, not only to be more prep work and more shared working space for the two cooks in the kitchen, but also just sort of bridged the big walking across gap from the fridge to the island to the sink to make all of this feel a little bit more contained.

We ended up shifting the kitchen down towards where the dining table had been, and changing the access point slightly to get back out to the back garden and doing a built in corner nook that had its back to the main living room and also created a little screen wall that created some privacy to the bedroom hallway. If you pop into the show notes page and check out the perspective views, you really see how that happens in the second alternative, though, we tucked a seating Nook and eat in kitchen area into the window wall looking out over the back garden, and we put in a long L shaped bench with a small table, so that when it’s just the two of them at home, they can either pull up two chairs and look into the corner, or they can both sit at the bench and look out towards the kitchen.

But they’re not using up all of the bench that they have with table if they want to have a dinner party and have another two, three or even four couples over, they can put leaves into the table and sit along the full length of that bench. But it also becomes a handy place to just sit, not at a table, and have a look at what’s happening inside of the kitchen.

In this scenario, we kind of shifted the working spaces of the kitchen out towards the living room and made more of a living room, kitchen, dining or eat, in distinction, as opposed to a living room, eat in kitchen, way across and then our third scheme, we pushed the kitchen down towards the garden window wall, away from the main bulk of the living room, and reoriented the island we had actually put, in this case, a new little sunroom addition off the edge of the kitchen from what had been a former patio, and that put a dining area space into that sunroom.

Logically so we got to have a combination of both even more views of the garden and pushing the kitchen down to make more space, more flow, more openness around the living room and the transition into the bedroom area. Each of these had their pros and cons, and they were each paired with a different style and number of handy objects and surfaces inside of a butler’s pantry that led out to the garden space.

We wanted to have a utility sink in there. Several of our examples had laundry tucked into that space, instead of in the less in a more awkward sort of kitchen, bedroom, hallway location. And we also, because they were doing a lot of food processing and garden prep, we wanted to have a space for them to have food dryers and extra storage jars, that kind of thing could all happen in the butler’s pantry instead of In the Kitchen proper.

One way or another, each of these scenarios really improves on their ability for two people to do kitchen tasks at the same time, and for them to both feel comfortable in the house alone but also have practical spaces for entertaining. The other major changes we made to this house were simply rearranging the division of space with inside of the already generous bathroom, there’s a little private three quarters bath for the small guest room bedroom.

But because the two of them live alone in this house, we just were able to, rather than creating an owner suite bathroom, we were just able to put energy into the main house bathroom, and they can easily get to that from their bedroom by stepping out into the hallway, which was all they needed or wanted in this scenario. Actually, I think we’ve got time to talk about one other recent project we took on, which is a bit of an exception to our classic rule of always begin from a master plan. In this case, the owners had a super charming mid-century home, a flat roofed house that I’ve driven by and admired.

In fact, I had photographed this house and put it on my Instagram as an example of really charming windows, paint color and garage arrangement probably as far back as 2019 when I first started really posting about my obsession with mid-century homes, I was beyond tickled when the owners of this home reached out to me about help for remodeling their mid-century kitchen. I don’t make a lot of noise here on the podcast or on the website. It’s not available on the website as a package that we offer, but we do occasionally, for the right clients, for the kind of clients whose house I’ve already photographed and fallen in love with, five years ago, six years ago, do a mini Master Plan package that looks only at one part of the house.

But from our typical Master Plan perspective, for these owners, the rest of the house was in great shape, but the kitchen, although not a remodel, had been added on, probably in the mid 60s, judging by the state and style of the cabinets in what had once been a three season room, the space had never been properly insulated and was not properly heated.

So this entire time, it’s been having moisture issues, and it’s been having thermal control issues, and it’s also just been it had an odd combination of being not an entirely small space, and having built ins along three different lengthy walls, but still feeling small and kind of hard to share the space in, and just having a table in the middle of it that was used for nearly every activity in the house, homework, art projects, cooking projects, the family together around.

But The whole kitchen felt crowded, cut off, and it just had as many maintenance issues as you might imagine from a space that was slightly uneasily converted from a three season space into one of the more functional rooms in the house, way back in 1960 something.

So in this case, our mandate was somewhat to start from scratch in a small space and create both an area that was more effective for one or two adults to cook in, and for the entire family of four to hang out in and be social and do art projects and homework in, and also to create an accurate, or, I guess, an accessible through path out to the adjacent patio, which, of course, from the kitchen they wanted to get to the patio to grill, but it was also the way to the patio from the house proper.

So this is really a place where you might want to pop over again to the show notes. Head over to mid mod midwest.com/what, is it? 2113 to see both the different floor plan scenarios that we suggest for this and also some views of how they pop up in three dimensions, but we chose to test three different scenarios. The first one was maybe the most modern option, to have two opposite walls of built in, one with the sink.

We kept the sink in the same spot in each variation, but to keep the sink and the dishwasher together as they were, to move the cooktop to a large central island, and then the BOP the refrigerator over to the opposite side. So it was handy for people popping in to get a snack or a drink to take back into the dining room of the rest of the house. This kitchen probably had the most working cooking space, but less comfortable hangout spots, even though we did put in some bar stool seating at the island counter. In the second scenario, we kind of divided the kitchen into a pass through zone and a working zone.

And this can be really helpful, particularly if you have a one cook kitchen, but even for a two cook kitchen, where you’ve got adults who are doing their own thing and kids who are coming in, swirling in, hanging out with them, but you don’t want them to be underfoot.

So we had a U shaped Peninsula layout on one side of this kitchen, with the kitchen the sink and the cooktop opposite each other. A little pass through window to hand objects out to the dining room, and then more of a walk by pantry storage, oven wall opposite that and a place for to put, to pull up bar stools around a counter.

This third scenario is the one I hoped they would choose, and was delighted to find that they did, because it compromises a less modern solution, a small island, but enough to give you a space to turn around, for multiple people, to have prep space, to have some space where you’re not standing and facing a wall, but not to take up too much of the room. Because I also wanted to put in an L shaped corner built in booth. I am foolishly fond of suggesting a built in bench seating area in a kitchen, in any kitchen that it is possible, plausible, I will recommend this. I personally find them to be very comfortable.

Occasionally have clients who say, No, that’s not my style, and in which case, we’ll design around it. We’ll do something else. But it is such a pleasant way to let a kitchen be a multi-use space. We spend a lot of time in our kitchens. In this day and age. We charge our electronics there. It’s a place where we have snacks. We do work, homework, work for. Home, household paperwork. We have intimate conversations late at night as the dishes have been washed and you’re just sort of sitting down before you move off to another part of the house.

It is wonderful to have something that is more comfortable than a kitchen chair in a kitchen space like this, and it can also be a very efficient way to tuck in a small eat in kitchen table, where you don’t have room to have chairs going all the way around, you can tuck a table into a corner booth, and when no one’s sitting there, you can even shove the table in further to take up less square footage. Beyond that, you can hide storage underneath the booth in drawers that pull out. Now this isn’t the most accessible storage for Super daily use things, but it is a wonderful place to tuck in art supplies for homework that’s being done in the kitchen, or kind of extra overflow baking supplies, the kind of ingredients you’re not grabbing for every day, but you do.

You might not want to store them in another part of the house. You want them in the kitchen, even though you’re not using them on a daily basis. So I think that each of these scenarios was really fun. We also, in this case, because these clients were vintage lovers, we played around with some less modern cabinet designs, some more slider doors, some more little wooden valence hiding a kitchen sink light, cafe curtains in the kitchen window. In each scenario, some vintage style refrigerators to bring back some of the 60s charm to this space, even though we’re going to be basically starting from scratch.

So pop on over to the show notes and have a look at some of these sketches to see how charming these options are. And think about what you might pick if this was your kitchen scenario, or what you might cherry pick to add from this kitchen into your thoughts on design for your own kitchen. Part of what ties each of these projects together is that in none of these scenarios were we dealing with an original mid-century kitchen or even really an original mid-century kitchen footprint or floor plan to work from.

So we had no temptation to go back to anything that had been there originally. We had the freedom to think about what would be the workspace arrangement that would suit the cooking style, the social hosting style, the number of members of the household of this new family, and how would they want their kitchen to be laid out.

Then we pair that with the esthetics of what’s going to blend well with the woodwork, the stain color, the grain, the metal choices that match what is existing in the mid-century, charm of the house, but at the same time, tuning the esthetic of those layouts, the esthetic of those built ins, rather to match the choices the taste of the new owners. So in one case, we are going really time capsule.

We’re maybe even looking to build in some elements that might seem to be original to the house. And in another case, we’re just, we’re leaning into the modern of the mid-century, modern, and yet we’re still trying to make sure that it feels connected to what was there in the past. In no case, typically do I recommend returning to the original mid-century kitchen footprint or floor plan. Now that comes with a couple of caveats. There have been, I’ve had several clients over the years, several out of several 100.

So we’re talking maybe the one or 2% range here. But I’ve had, I have had clients, and I can say there’s an exception to every rule who prefer a closed off mid-century kitchen layout. This is often the case in a household where one person, and it’s not necessarily mom anymore, really, is the sole food producer in the household, and their cooking style is that they like to go away, make a big mess, be the master or mistress of their own domain, be left alone while they’re making food and experimenting and baking, and then come out and deliver food to the rest of the household, kind of in the manner that mid-century kitchens were intended to be used for people like that, for solo cooks, closed off kitchen, a closed off L shaped kitchen, particularly if it does have a little bit of island space in it can work.

In it can work just fine, and even a galley kitchen can end up being quite efficient. I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but in my 20s, I lived in a one bedroom apartment on the third floor of a 1930s residential hotel converted into apartment buildings, and it had the tiniest little kitchen alcove. The actual kitchen counter was, Oh, I think it was about a two foot wide space that had once been, had once had an under counter refrigerator in it, and now had just like open storage underneath a tiny sink. I don’t think it was even two feet wide, and then a two foot wide slide in range. And the refrigerator, then had been added by the apartment complex. Just outside of that, I put in my own floor to ceiling freestanding shelving unit and Bucha block counter and the whole thing. I set the counter at a sort of a diagonal angle so it had a little bit more workspace, but I could stand on one foot and pivot. I could sort of step back from the stove and turn and pivot at the same time, and step forward one step and be at my butcher block.

So if I was making, I did a lot of cooking from scratch. I did a lot of really elaborate cooking in that kitchen. So if I was making, say, handmade raviolis, I could put them together on the counter, step, pivot, step, and drop them into the hot, boiling water on the stove and then scoop them back out.

You know, all the things worked really nicely for one person who never hosted more than two other people at a time during the entire time I lived in that apartment. Hi, I’m an introvert. It’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me, or whatever. It works for me, but that kind of kitchen scenario works for only the small, small minority of kitchen requesters. So for most of my clients, we are always looking to update the layout while not erasing the mid-century style of a mid-century kitchen. And if you find yourself in a scenario where you already have a flipped kitchen. You have the freedom to feel Unbound, unburdened by what has been, and you can sort of move forward and make choices that suit you.

Talking about three is three houses with a lot of architect designed mid-century charm and with kitchens that were not what they once were, made me think of again, going back years and years. One of my earliest master plan projects was in Michigan, outside of Ann Arbor, an architect designed home that had been largely untouched, but then someone had come in in the 90s and done a number on the Owner’s Suite.

They’d really reconfigured things and made quite a mess of the owner’s bathroom and the kitchen. They’d taken out the original kitchen and put in a cherry and black granite, sort of open plan layout that was really awkward, and you had to walk through it on a diagonal to get from the owner’s bedroom into the kids bedroom wing at all it had, it had some major layout flaws, but that remodeled kitchen was quite different from the kitchen that had been there in the past.

And they had the original blueprints, the design drawings in what had been a big open kitchen, dining room space, I think at least 10 by 20, but it might have been more like 15 by 30 feet in a big rectangle within another rectangle of deck out beyond big floor to ceiling glass windows, cool architect design space, like I said, the kitchen had been dropped into a corner like a little pre manufactured phone booth. It was completely closed in by upper cabinets.

You could see out in a gap between the upper cabinets and the base cabinets, but it was walled in, and it was a tiny G shaped kitchen, just like the large G shaped kitchen in the first project, I will throw the perspective rendering from the architect’s original plan of that kitchen into the show notes for this page, because it just goes to show that even in a big open plan modernist version of a mid-century house, the kitchen was often very un-modern, very “Little Mrs. In her house dresses in there all by herself”.

And as clever and cute as this drawing is, it always kind of blows my mind how much they took this beautiful open plan house with big floor to ceiling windows, and then they cut them off from the rest of the house so that they could make sure that the kitchen was its little separate away space that wouldn’t bother anybody. Um, all right, all of that to say, I’m so fortunate to get to work with homes and people who are so lovely and have so many fine features and so many fine requests.

And I hope that in talking through some of the design decisions and options that I put forward for my clients, I’ve given you a few bits of inspiration. And if you’re looking for more visual inspiration, please don’t hesitate to pop over to the show notes page and check out the original floor plan sketch and then the updated multiple options that we put together for mostly kitchens, but I think also a couple of owners bedroom layouts on these three recent projects. I’d love to hear what you think about them, and I’ll probably put them up on Instagram as well, so that you can do our classic slider vote.

Which of these three scenarios would have you chosen if it was your home. I wonder if you’ll choose what the owners chose. Let’s see. To wrap up this week, rather than doing a mid-century house feature of the week, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna do a little so long farewell salute to the original built in planter in that second house I described that supported a major structural element of the house and that I assume foolish flippers knocked out with a sledgehammer one day, took out the post that was supporting a major wall of windows.

If this is you, if you’re ever tempted to say, what if I took out this planter and. Post, what good could they possibly be doing? I recommend that you do not, because you may find yourself with a leaky roof just a few years down the line, even if nothing actually makes a creaking noise and collapses in a heap in front of you when you knock out that post.

Oh, wow. Okay, this is a total tangent, but I am just I have to do a shout out to my sister’s med school friend and colleague who I was also I also consider, a dear friend from back in the day, who once asked me, inebriated at a med school party, if I would show him the secret post that he could take a sledgehammer to and take out the structure for an entire building. I did decline to give him that information, particularly in his state.

But Mateo, if you’re listening, this house should not have had that post removed. It did not eventually collapse the whole building, but it did. It would have, over time, if that roof leak had gotten any worse. So again, I don’t think my clients were wrong to have addressed that issue expeditiously and first, but I always when there is an opportunity to incorporate structural or maintenance issues into your master plan, thinking you will be likely to be better off in that case, that’ll be it for this episode.

You can find the transcript, the links of the resources and all of the sketches that mid mod Midwest did for these three various clients at the show notes page. Mid mod midwest.com/ 2113 113, and stick around for the next four weeks. I’m going to be doing I’m going to be taking a personal break from the podcast, but you won’t, because I am putting together several combination episodes with my best past advice leading you through the Master Plan process.

If you’ve been thinking about maybe kicking off a master plan process for your home improvement, or if you want to do even just one room, if you want to start thinking about your whole house renovation. The next four episodes are really going to walk you through why and how to bring the full power of Master Plan thinking to bear on your own home or on anyone’s home, and I think you’re really gonna enjoy them. So long for now, mid mod remodeler.

Pin
Tweet
Share
Pocket
Email