Artful Midcentury Remodels

In need of more room for their growing brood, Eric and Emma Gimon, with Luc, Paul, baby Louise, and their dog, Nefi, asked for a private space to accompany the house designed for Eric’s great-aunt.

New doors and windows and a simplified palette lend the master bedroom—which retains the lines of the original mid-century modern house—a calm, unfussy elegance.

The living room, with vintage furnishings by Harry Bertoia, Paul McCobb, and others, overlooks the heavily wooded site, which adjoins a protected watershed. Goddard and Mandolene replaced the original tile floor with a glossy coat of resin and restored the original ceiling.

The house incorporates a variety of wood finishes, all in the same general color palette: unfinished ipe for the pool terrace, Douglas fir for the trellis and windows, and stained cypress for the siding mixed in with the exterior’s original redwood.

In the living room, a pair of Tree coat hangers by Michael Young and Katrin Petursdottir for Swedese contrast with the live foliage outside.

Living with Legends: The History Behind an Incredible Find The Ion chairs by Gideon Kramer were introduced in the Space Needle’s Eye of the Needle restaurant at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. They were designed for the Ion Furniture Company in chromed steel and fiberglass. “I became aware of the requirements as well as deficiencies of seating and decided to see if I could do better,” Kramer said of the design. “The chair took its form from the process which it was intended to support.” Initial prototypes, he said, “were fabricated out of Vulcanized Fiber, with the simplest of tooling. Soaked in our bathtub, formed on a wood fixture, baked over the living room stove, hung on a wash line to be sprayed with a resin finish. [It was] a low tech family enterprise.”