An Architect’s Slim Home Emphasizes the Outdoors and Aging in Place

Architect Kyu Sung Woo’s new home is not the only contemporary dwelling on the leafy Cambridge street where Colonials mingle with Victorians. It’s not even the only one Kyu Sung designed. There’s also the daring-for-its-time Harvard University faculty compound from the mid-1980s and the brazen, postmodern house the Seoul-born architect built for his family in 1989. Fifteen years after moving in, Kyu Sung and his wife, concert pianist Jung-Ja Kim, acquired the lot next door. They expanded their garden but otherwise left the property alone for 10 years, pondering what would come next.