Open Corner Midcentury

The OC Midcentury project was completed in early 2020 and was an extensive remodel of a single family home built in 1962. The house is located on Mercer Island, WA in a quiet neighborhood.

The home originally started out as a rectangular 2 story house but received an ad-hoc 1 story gabled addition to the rear a few years later. This created a ‘L’ shape footprint and was clearly not given much thought. The added appendage jammed up the natural flow of the house, obstructed the connection to the outdoors and created confusion in the plan with competing living rooms. Addressing this aspect was the first clear problem to solve. The second problem was upstairs with the need for a proper master suite and to alleviate a very cramped plan that was packed with 5 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1 laundry room.

Our design solution started by opening up the floor plan with the installation of two 21’ steel beams at the core of the house. This allowed us to open things up from front to back. We then eliminated redundancies in the plan by arranging the dining, kitchen, and living room spaces in a linear procession. We traded walls for glazing at the inside corner of the “L” which blurred the line between outdoors and in and flooded the interiors with an abundance of natural light. Upstairs we gave things more breathing room by taking over 1 of the bedrooms and widening the central corridor.

Credits:

Architect: Analogous Architecture

Contractor: Ainslie-Davis Construction

Structural Engineer: Todd Perbix

Photography: Ross Eckert Photo