You Can Go Home Again

Written by Renske Wener

Photographed by Janis Nicolay

One morning eleven years ago, Myriam Freedman woke up with a jolt. She and her husband, Mason, had always been fans of modern architecture, but they had a sudden chance to move into Mason’s childhood home—a 4,000-square-foot 1957 traditional ranch house in Vancouver—and Myriam realized they needed to jump on it. “The residence was already on the market, with an interested buyer to boot,” she recounts, “so while the purchase seemed impulsive, with a future renovation as part of our calculated budget, it made complete economic sense in the crazy Vancouver housing market.”

Nine years later, the Freedmans were still happy with the house—they’d fallen in love with the functional master suite on the main floor and the semiseparate kitchen—but the couple was ready for a modern update. “I started planning all this a decade ago,” Myriam confesses. “I even trained my family to not use the back door because I knew it would be gone eventually.” When the time came to upgrade the house, they knew that remodeling rather than rebuilding was the wisest choice. “There is a lot of sentiment here,” Myriam notes, “but the real reason for choosing a renovation over new construction was our desire to preserve the practical layout. We also didn’t need any additional square footage; the house was big enough as is!”

Architect Allison Holden-Pope, principal at One SEED Architecture + Interiors, understood and fully embraced the homeowners’ approach. “Functionally, the layout of the three-level house worked, so we focused on preservation of the footprint and reintegration of the structure with its site,” she explains. The home was stranded in the middle of the lot, with a humble garden and a simple strip of concrete running up to the door. The homeowners wanted to reclaim their underused front yard and redevelop an area in the back that was dominated by an old cedar tree and a garage. “The house was fighting its environment instead of relating to it,” Holden- Pope says. “Reconnecting the two permeated the design.”

The Freedmans weren’t initially sure what to do with the exterior (they favored a West Coast modern style, with large windows and sustainable materials), so Holden-Pope presented an idea: redefine the home’s visual identity through themes of folding and wrapping. “The original residence wasn’t pushing up against the city’s set boundaries for height, so we ripped the roof right off and raised it,” she says. The west-facing façade is now a pair of bold, stepped-back rectangles, both partially paneled in Longboard, a type of sustainable aluminum siding. A visually modest third rectangle, at the back of the house, contains the kids’ bedrooms. “The layered effect of the boxy roofs grants the house a gentler relation to the site,” Holden-Pope explains. Each of the three rectangular additions is wrapped in a charcoal aluminum box that allows for oversized windows and raised ceilings. Both the front and back yards received a total overhaul—the former was reimagined with oversized concrete pavers, wispy tufts of grass, and several large, raised garden beds framed in Cor-ten steel. In the back, a wide set of stairs leads to an outdoor living space that gives way to a basketball court for the boys.

The house’s formerly flat rear façade has been given depth, and a four-paneled folding glass door from Marvin Windows and Doors connects it to the backyard. The concrete basketball court is a family favorite.

The back of the house prior to the remodel. Many of the original window openings remain, but the raised roof allowed an increase in window height.

At the front entrance, a little alcove was carved out to better position the front door, but otherwise the main floor’s footprint is practically unchanged. “We preserved 92 percent of the exterior walls and left most windows in the same place,” Holden-Pope explains. On the main floor, the den was converted into an open-plan master suite, and one wall ascending the full height of the stairwell was clad in slate to visually connect all three levels of the house. “The functions of each room are the same,” Myriam notes. “It’s funny: my youngest son now sleeps in the exact room where my husband slept when he was the same age.”

This sense of continuity brings comfort to the entire family. Despite the radical revisions, Myriam happily reports, “my boys feel like they live in the exact same house as before.” »

The interiors take cues from the patterns and materials used for the home’s exterior architecture. One living room wall, clad in vertical Douglas fir slats, was painted a charcoal hue to echo the scale and rhythm of the horizontal landscape walls in the front yard.

Pale blue millwork, in tandem with white cabinetry from Vertical Grain Projects, lends cool airiness to the minimalist kitchen. The countertops are a porcelain product from Neolith. The range is GE Monogram and the hood is Venmar. All appliances are from Edmonds Fine Appliances. Cabinet hardware is Richelieu, and the faucet is Valley from Save More Plumbing. The light fixture over the island is from Luminosa Light & Home.