The best way to make the most of your mid-century remodel is to use the Master Plan method!
If you’ve been following along this month you know the four cornerstones of a great Mid Mod design … but how do you make sure that you’re going to bake them into your own home and plans?
Before you start calling contractors and deciding what to do first … I want you to hit pause for just a moment.
Watch a quick lesson on using the Master Plan Method to apply all four cornerstones:
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Resources to help you design the cornerstones into your remodel
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
There’s more to what makes a mid-century house mid-century than the date it was constructed. I mean, it’s certainly possible for a past and future remodel to remove or overwrite just about every great mid-mod feature. Poor went out for all the ranches updated into cottages in the early 2000s. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
I laid the cornerstones of a great modern model out to make it a little easier to keep the mid-century alive in your house while you upgrade it to fit your life. So now that we’ve spent four episodes covering the basics of emphasizing asymmetry, keeping simple shapes, choosing the right mix of materials and always improving flow between the spaces in your home, let’s talk about how to pull it all together. Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you imagine a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, and you’re listening to Episode 1505.
I bet you have questions you’d like to ask an architect sometime, maybe even an architect who is say, as obsessed with mid-century homes as you are with yours. Maybe you’re confused about what a contractor told you recently, or there’s something troubling that your cousin suggested over the holidays about your house layout that you haven’t been able to stop thinking about since or you need an argument between you and your partner settled.
I get it. Sometimes you just need a little outside input. That’s why I hold architect’s office hours, every first Monday of the month to answer the burning or hey, I just wondered about questions of my ready to remodel students. And last month, I held an open architect Office Hours call for anyone who wanted to show up. Did you catch that? It was great.
In case you’ve been on the fence. I wanted you to know that this month. The Office Hours call normally on the first Monday of the month is happening on January 8, because New Year’s Day needed a little breathing room. Am I right?
That means you’ve got a few more days to decide that now is the moment to give yourself access to ready to remodel and take a spin through the program materials. Check out the bonus resources on how to design for an addition. Set a simple style guide or plan the perfect kitchen update and then show up and ask your question at next Monday’s call.
Look, I can’t promise to really settle that argument between you and your spouse. But I have been known to offer some fresh perspective and find some very useful design compromises for personal disagreements anyway, why not kick off the new year right by reaching out to get the help you’ve been wanting with the remodeling questions that have been weighing you down and holding you back.
Speaking of answering questions, today’s episode is going to walk you through the how of all the cornerstones connecting together and help you to create a great mid-mod Whole Home update. I’ll be sharing answers to some past questions from other mid mom homeowners about great patios and decks. How to make a hallway more MCM charming. The right closet doors for a mid-century update and more.
Find the show notes for this episode at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1505.
The cornerstones of mid-century design go hand in glove together asymmetry, simple shapes, mix of materials and the flow between spaces all work together to create a great design. And today I want to talk about how you can make sure you’re including these elements in your home update, how you can apply them to your house whether it’s modest or magnificent, because a great mid-century home new or original or updated lives and dies on how much it has these elements.
There’s one part of a mid-century house that I end up helping my clients with no matter what else is going on in their house. I’ve said before most mid-century updates include working on the kitchen. But the other area that nearly every masterplan package I do includes is something about how the house connects to its outside spaces. And today, I happen to be working on four different master plan projects at various stages in their development.
A new one just kicking off one in the middle of the design project where I’m working more internally to create something I’m going to share with the client soon one where I was meeting with a client to discuss the end of their package and how we’re going to move it forward. And then one where I’m following up with a former master plan client who is in the process of construction and checking in with me on some some design details. In each one of those projects, we were talking about how the house connects to its outside spaces, and how we can use these cornerstones of mid-century design to make that work even better.
So if you’re watching a replay of this, I want you to go ahead to the link in my bio or to midmod-midwest.com/cornerstones and grab the download PDFs you can follow along with its design. If you’re watching live Hello, it’s so great to have you here. I’m going to be answering questions today. So put your questions, your comments, your thoughts, your reactions in the comment window here and I’ll respond to them in real-time.
And I wanted to ask you a question right now. How do you feel about the way your house connects to your backyard spaces? Is it great? Do you think it’s perfect? Is it okay? Or is it not really great at all? And which one of these sounds more like you you Don’t really have connection to your backyard at all right now or you’ve got something, you’ve got a patio, you’ve got a deck, but it doesn’t feel very mid-century? In either of those cases, there’s something we can do. And most of the clients that come to me wanting to make improvements to their house, okay? I’ve got unexceptional. Fair, we can work with this.
Most of the clients that come to me wanting to make improvements to their mid-century house wanting to tweak their house to make it more their home to make it work for their life, one of the things they’re looking to change is the amount of connection that they have to their backyard spaces. Here’s some examples off the top of my head. A great little mid-century ranch. I’ve got deck not very connected, yeah. And a deck.
This is yeah, the example I was just gonna say a great little mid-century Ranch, actually in Tacoma, Washington, overlooking the ocean. And what they had was a tiny little deck that you could only go out through through a small sliding glass door and the kitchen actually overlooks the ocean. And what it had was a very small window and a door without a window in it that connected it to outside. So our whole design brief was, how do we make this house based its ocean view.
In another more simple manner, just here in Madison, Wisconsin, I had some clients in a modest ranch house, their house had a detached garage, which it eventually been detached by a little screen porch. And they’d spent their pandemic period sitting in a little slab on grade, very ad hoc screen porch that was maybe eight feet by 10 feet into folding chairs because it was their best way to connect outside it was the only place they could be in open space but not out in the buggy yard where they were looking at their backyard which they loved.
They were avid gardeners and it’s such a pretty place. So one of the things we did there was we were actually going to be putting a small addition on their house and everything about that addition was how are we connecting it with the backyard? Okay, I’m getting some comments I’m gonna go back and read here let’s see we’ve got deck not very connected we’ve got connection not great have to go through the laundry or the bedroom to get there. Yeah, that’s that’s not an ideal way to reach your backyard your social space. We’ve got so much concrete. This can also happen not ideal. Don’t love it in a tree canopy and an inclined on leaving terrain, so there’s no grass.
Yeah. So thinking about the way that your yard is landscaped also has something to do with the way that you experience going out into it if it’s inviting or not. Okay, here we’ve got screened patio is one of my favorite parts of the house to escape, but it feels about two feet too narrow. Yeah, there’s a right proportion, there’s sort of a minimum viable size. This is not to do with mid-century houses.
But every time I see new apartments going up being constructed around town, I kind of roll my eyes because they always have these little vestigial decks off of each unit that are just big enough that you can technically fit a grill and someone can stand out and grill on them. But they’re never big enough to fit more than a cafe table. They’re never big enough to really sit down have multiple people sit around. Experience the space.
Christopher Alexander who wrote A Pattern Language way back in the 70s, based on traditional historical patterns of human design said that basically any functional patio or deck or outside space should be at least six feet deep, if not more, but at least six feet deep. So there’s room to both walk around something and to sit at a table or just sit in a chair and walk all the way around the person in that chair. Okay, one more comment. Not bad planning a Swim Spa. Oh, fun. I’d love to hear more about that.
Okay, so we’re getting some responses on how people’s backyards faces respond to their house and how their house responds to their backyard space. If you want to dig more deeply into this. I hope you’ve already got your ticket for next Saturday’s mid-century design clinic on patios, decks and other outside spaces. We’re gonna be doing a two-hour live workshop where I walk you through the steps of the master plan method, which I’m just about to be talking about. And we apply all these design cornerstones to your house in real-time. Bring a tape measure, bring a sketchbook we will be making design decisions at that workshop. I hope you’ll be there. And the early bird price for that workshop expires at the end of the weekend. So sign up right now.
Okay. Um, I wanted to talk to you about master plan. What does that mean? When I use the words masterplan method, what I mean is the steps, a five d framework that I always use with my clients to make sure that we’re catching everything we need to when we design a great mid-century sensitive update for their home.
We start with the first D dream. And that includes everything that’s important to them about the way they want to live in their home. When you’re thinking about your house. What’s your vision for the life that you want to live in it lead in it not just what it looks like. Not the Instagram pretty version, but is it a social space? Or is it a restorative space? And this really applies to backyard to outside flow. When you think about your backyard space, your deck your patio, whether or not it’s connected to the house right now. When you dream about it? Is it a place where you’re hosting big gatherings? Is it a place where you’re stepping outside yourself with a coffee with a glass of wine? To have a quiet, personal moment?
Both of those answers are correct. They’re different for every single person. And that matters to what you’re going to do, what design will be right for your house. So dream is really important. It’s step one of any great design process. The next step is discovery. And that’s looking at the house you’ve got right now. So I’m asking you questions about how is your house relating to the type of space. How? But we might also ask questions like, what is the structure of your house? What is the slope of your yard? From your floor level? To the yard beyond? Are you out at grade even? What’s the house made of? What are the exterior maintenance challenges we deal with?
This design is super important in planning a practical remodel. And if you don’t take time to do discovery, you’ll end up with expensive surprises when you start talking to contractors. The third day of the five days in the master plan method is distill. And that’s all about figuring out what mid-century means to you what your personal version of mid-century style is. And this is where we talked about this a lot.
On Wednesday, when we were talking about materials. If you have taken my style quiz, you’ve already got a ballpark range of where you fall within the min sensory pantheon. But are you more vintage, more mod somewhere in there? I know it sounds like the audio is cutting out. Apologies, I’m just going to have to keep going because I don’t know how to fix that. So let’s see, we were talking about the five d framework distill is determining where you are on your personal style range.
And then Drafting is where we start to bring in this is the place where we really catch all the cornerstones of a mid-century design. Drafting is where we think about these design questions where we brainstorm multiple options, where we think about, I like to always suggest three possibilities to my clients in a master plan.
So I’ll give them a lightweight intervention, the sort of least they could do a surgical strike, a tweaking for their house. A medium range, and then a really big fun, expensive plan. Maybe kind of budget-busting. But then what we can do is we can look at in all the different areas of the house, we’re working on what’s the most important? What needs the most? And where we want to go for those sort of level three changes and what might need more of a tweak. In the end, we pull together a full scheme that works for the entire house and works for the budget works for the goals of the project.
And then the last step is to develop because you’re not going to just solve all your problems in one big brainstorming session and then be done developing the master plan takes place over time. And it just goes on and on until basically you’re done with your entire remodel project until you’re done living in your home maybe.
So depending on whether you’re planning to do a big contractor lead everything done at once remodel, if that’s you say, Hey, you’re a level three remodeler, you’re going all the way at once. Or maybe like a lot of my clients, you’re planning to do something this year, something next year, something year after that, then you might want to have a longer planning master plan. But having all of those things come together is really important to planning a great remodel for your house.
Using these five steps, Dream discover, to still draft to develop gives you enough time gives you a framework to make sure that you’re keeping the mid-century in your house that you’re not just sort of dealing with one problem at a time calling a contractor getting their specialty bid, and then accepting it without thinking about how each part of the house fits into the other parts, and how each element of your design feels mid-century as you carry it forward.
So let’s see, I wanted to make sure we were going to talk about how the four cornerstones really connect together. Because today this week, we were talking about how each one works individually. But really, they all network. simple shapes, only work only have beauty when they’re made out of great materials. And they’re given interest by being placed in asymmetrical alignments, you can create that asymmetry not just with the form of your house, but with the materiality.
So if you’re in your living room, it might be a perfectly symmetrical box of a room. Maybe there’s asymmetry in the way that the entries and exit doors and windows fall on it. But you might also choose to add a material or you might already have a material stone on the fireplace that starts to wrap around the corner that’s creating a symmetry.
You might add a material you might add paneling to your living room and create a cemetery as it wraps around. When we’re talking about your backyard spaces, your patio, your deck asymmetry will often come out of the way that you’re kind of creating an enclosed space. You’re creating a nestled space in your house.
So in a builder basic Ranch, the connection to the backyard is just the back wall of the house. That’s very unwelcoming. But if you start to play with the asymmetry, you start to push back maybe a fence line, maybe a privacy wall, maybe an addition of your house or the garage pushes back and nestled into that corner is a nook of outside space that feels really comfortable to linger, which invites you to step outside.
And then the materiality of your house also connects one space to another, you might have the same stone happening at the front detail of your house and a decorative knee wall, at your fireplace, and then perhaps in the paver patio of your backyard space. And if you’re putting in a new patio, you might choose stone that has a similar origin, a similar color, a similar texture to the stone that you’ve got in your fireplace, and on the front of your house, making these material connections helps flow go right through the house.
All right. It’s Friday, I don’t want to completely overburden you now. But I want to answer your questions. So what questions are on your mind about how you can incorporate these mid-century design elements into your remodel? How are you? What are you worried about? When you’re planning a remodel? What are you worried about losing? Or what are you wishing to add to your mid-century house?
When I’m working with my clients on their master plan projects, or even in little consultation calls, we’re always thinking about what are the choices we’re going to make that will help this new part of the house feel, if not original, at least connected to what went before, we want to make sure that every new change you make is for a purpose that it’s going to make your life better in the house, that it’s going to improve the design cohesion of the house, and you’re not going to feel perfectly vintage perfectly. Like you’d be surprised that was a new feature. But you want it to feel like this new decision is friends with previous decisions.
You never want the end result of your remodel to be that five years from now someone walks through the house. And they might not say anything to you. But they’ll look around and they’ll think oh, I know exactly what year this remodel happened. You want it to feel organically connected. Like it sort of grew out of a marriage between what the house was and what you wanted it to be.
And there they are interconnected. And using the cornerstones of mid-mod remodels is how you can make sure that all your design choices will turn out just like that. I’m not getting any questions. So I think I’m gonna wrap up, but I’m just gonna let you know that. I know it’s possible to create a wonderful update. Sometimes even you know, in the case of a house that’s experienced some damage, sometimes there are houses that have been neglected and they have mildew, mold, structural issues, and they require even a full dramatic gut, it is still possible to create a design that is cohesive, that is beautiful.
And that feels related to the mid-century era of the house while it suits the specific lifestyle needs of the people that are going to live there. And you can do that using the cornerstones. Okay, I’m gonna question what are good options for a hallway? The fairytale club. Can you tell me a little bit more about you mean a bedroom hallway? To make it feel mid-century? Okay. What mid-century features have you got right now? anything or nothing? Are you living in a time capsule or a flip?
I’ll just tell you, okay. Um, oh, I’m getting a great another separate comment. Thinking about hallways, things you can do to make a hallway feel more mid-century, relatively speaking, you just want to make lightweight subtle choices that work you want to if you have any original woodgrain in your trim, you want to feature that don’t paint it. If you don’t, you might think about trying to strip paint off of your original trim or bring it back in a hallway.
Honestly, you’re gonna do a lot with decor items. You’re trying to make your house feel mid-century, you might hang mid-century style art on the walls. Another way though, to improve a hallway that’s not necessarily out of the mid-century era, but is a wonderful decision is to bring in more light to bring in more daylight, it’s a great place to use a light tube, not actually a full skylight. Although that would be amazing and actually give you flow from your house up to the sky. But to put in a simple light tube would bring daylight into hallways are usually places that don’t have any opportunities for Windows, no exterior walls, and it gives you an opportunity to create more brightness and to make the hallway itself a little bit more of a destination.
I love the goal of trying to make your house more MCM let’s see. Um, yeah. Then we got a question. I’ve already lost your name it scrolled up but I got a question about trying to find a way to put an owner suite or master suite onto a mid-century house. This is a great point because many mid-century houses were relatively modest in the bedroom areas at the time. They had as many bedrooms you know, whatever the number of adults and children that lived in the house typically. My neighbors next door raised a family of six in a three bedroom house.
And the house beyond there also raised a family of six and a house that they eventually put two extra basement bedrooms in but really very modest. Nowadays, we tend to Have a little bit more desire for a luxurious bedroom experience. And a lot of my clients put on owner suites when they are planning a mid-century update for their house, how to make a mid-century owner how to make an owner suite on an original mid-century house work.
There’s a number of factors. One, you want to think about the materiality of your outside. If you can pick up the tone, the material of the original siding, whether it’s brick, whether it’s stone, whether it’s wood, that’s wrapping around when you’re putting on an addition, that’s really important. You also want to think about what’s happening inside materially, you can either pick up your cues from what’s happening in the other bedrooms, if they’re interesting built in closets are storage units, you can try to pick up at least the same color of the wood in those.
But you can also just sort of come back to mid-century design principles. One thing I’m always putting into my mid-century, updated owner Suites is rather than having a walk in closet, which is kind of a 90s, or 2000s of McMansion concept of luxury, mid-century houses were much more likely to stack storage along a wall along the hallway if they have enough room. And so a wall of built built ins that go floor to ceiling, maybe that dissolve down into a bench or cabinet that has room for Windows, if it’s an exterior wall allows you to have walked by storage that one if you do it with woodgrain front cabinets gives you an opportunity to bring beautiful wood into the bedroom area.
And to allows you to actually have a lot of really dense practical storage, immediately accessible but totally out of sight when it’s all closed away. As opposed to a walk in closet when you walk in. When you go out and close the door, you don’t see any clutter. But when you go in, it’s very easy for a walk in closet to start to dissolve into messiness on a daily basis.
And the minute you step in, you’re seeing everything that’s happening in the walk in closet with walk by storage with a wall of full height, floor to ceiling, shelves, cabinets, drawers, you’re seeing everything is closed up, you’re just seeing the surface of the outside finish. But when you open it, you can get exactly what you want, just in a minute.
And then I actually have a whole slew of recommendations I make for when you need to update or replace or add a bathroom in a mid-century style. But this is probably a little bit too long of a thing. I have to do a special live on updating mid-century bathrooms or creating new mid-century style bathrooms in the near future.
All right. I think that I have my video is cutting out a little bit. I think I’ve had a couple of comments come by and I’m not seeing them. So okay, let’s see. You’re welcome the very tech club, I’ve got someone asking about closet doors primaries, we didn’t have any thinking of bifold. Bifolds are definitely an original mid-century choice. I actually, well, bifolds are great in that you can open them both and get the whole sort of view of the entire space. I would say if you can get good quality louvered bifolds. It’s actually a great mid-century choice.
But it’s also placed just to choose a simple slab style stainable wood, you don’t have to go with an actual material material. But you can choose a warm stain color. If it’s happening. If you have warm colored wood anywhere else in your house, you can match it to that. And you can start to bring more wood finish into the house.
If you don’t want to go with stained wood, I would say choosing a minimal surface very lightweight trim and doing the closet doors the exact same color as the wall so that as you glance past them, they start to sort of blend into each other and feels more lightweight. The other thing though, is I really like to do rather than actually having sort of a framed closet opening, if you’re building from scratch is to do floor to ceiling sliding panels. So you can slide them all across and stack them up. Or you can slide them all the way across and create a wall of closed storage. And that’s a really fun, practical way to have access to everything you want to see when you want to see it and close it all the way and have it become invisible when you don’t.
Let’s see. I’m really behind on my comments here. So I’m just going to try to scroll down for a little minute. Getting a heck yes on alive about bathrooms that will be another a topic for another day. All right. Here’s real team Coco asking. I have mid mod. Oops. My comments are scrolling slowly. Sorry.
Another question, what are some key features of a mid-century library? I’m planning to convert my tiny library, dining room into a library and I’m stumped with built ins versus shells. Oh, fun question. Okay. You can go one of two ways. You could do floor to ceiling built ins. And in that case, I would try to just make the structure as minimal as possible. Mid Century Modern people were very practical. They liked adjustable shelving. They would do solid wood shelves with adjustable brackets that could be mounted up and down. And that’s very flexible for whatever size books you’ve got you
You could also though if, depending on how massive your library collection is, this could be a great place to shop vintage and look for a modular shelving unit made with walnut or teak. You can find these on antique stores in state sales occasionally. And they are absolutely fantastic. Yeah, um, people are talking about finding vintage items shopping for a vintage on Instagram, I would definitely consider if you’re going to wrap the entire dining room, if your goal is to sort of fill two or three walls with shelving, you might go floor to ceiling.
But if you’re looking at sort of putting books on one wall in a dining room, I’m visualizing as I look off into space, I think it might be really fun to look for a vintage modular wall mounted shelving unit and install that. Let’s see. Yeah, oh, if you’re thinking, I’m sewing under the comments, but if you’re thinking about ripping out the closet frame, I would definitely say it’s not really doing you any good to have this sort of stage set for your closet, I would tear out the wall and do a track mount in your ceiling for floor to ceiling mounted sliders that will almost disappear.
Yeah. All right. Library tips. Exciting. All right. I think that I’m if you’re asking each other questions about where to post items with prices, I’m not actually very good at buying things from Instagram I the only reason I use Facebook is for my mid-century Facebook group and for Facebook marketplace, which I know you can buy fun vintage things from. But if you can buy vintage things on Instagram, go right ahead and do it. And then DM me and tell me how you do.
Okay. I feel like we have gotten off track and it’s Friday, I want to switch this drink of water for a drink of something else. But I would love to talk about this more with you. I would love to all answer all of your questions about making great mid-century choices for your patio deck or outside space at next Saturday’s live two hour design workshop, get your tickets at the link in my bio, or go to mid mod dash midwest.com/clinic.
If you buy before the end of the weekend, you get them for the earlybird discount. I don’t want you to be afraid of breaking your house new homeowner home with Krista and David, I want you to feel confident you can get a consultation with me by going to my website. There’s a link in my bio. But honestly, I just recommend you come to this design clinic and get a sense for the Master Plan method and everything I talked about. But if you want a one on one consultation, go right ahead. I love talking about mid-century design.
I love doing these lives. I’m gonna be doing more of them next week. So let’s see if the topic of bathrooms comes up then or at some point in the near future. But thanks so much for showing up with your questions. And thanks so much for loving your mid-century homes. I can’t wait to see you at the mid-century design clinic a week from Saturday.
So we’ll see you on Monday at the office hours call. In case you didn’t know there is a 12 month payment plan for lifetime access to ready to remodel so you can get access to everything starting right away for $167. I really don’t know why you wouldn’t. And by the way, your home is silently crossing its fingers that you will right now.
Okay, find the transcript for this episode and the link to the resources I’ve chatted about at the show notes page mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1505. And next week on the podcast, we’ll be kicking off season 16 And I’ll be honest with you, I am pretty jazzed about it. I’m planning to dig into the HGTV approach to home improvement and spoiler alert, I am not a big fan.
But this is more than a burn book or list of complaints. I’m going to be talking you through how to avoid trends and magical thinking in your plans. And instead to plan for a timeless remodel that will cost you a minimum amount of stress, time and dollars. Sound good? I know. I can’t wait to get started either. See you there.
