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“These clients really wanted it to be as dead accurate as it could be,” architect Jordan Snittjer says of this Chicago town house’s masonry, which transitions to an overhauled interior and a glassy rear extension.

Some feel like renting is a compromise while they wait to hook onto the property ladder, but for Jeff and Kim, it was their first chance to lay down roots.

a table by local workshop Chuch Estudio and Harry Bertoia side chairs.

The couple added curved cabinetry and a window seat to form a breakfast nook, painted in Farrow & Ball Red Earth. The table is discontinued from Anthropologie, where Kara previously worked as a display coordinator, and the overhead light is the Lambert & Fils Waldorf Double.

The house is clad with shou sugi ban-treated cedar siding.

The original layout was very much of the time: a perfect midcentury modern flow, with a closed-off kitchen and a fire put in the floor. “They were cool but impractical spaces,” says Schaer.

“All our inspiration was France, Italy, Morocco, Greece—just not England,” says homeowner Leila D’Angelo. “We deviated quickly from the idea of a ‘renovated Victorian house’ and leaned into something much more Mediterranean, because that’s what felt authentic to us.”

The couple completed their restoration in 2022. They repointed the original brick, which was in good shape.

When Rob and Mary Lubera started pulling threads to uncover the origins of their new home—the lone midcentury house amid rows of Tudor Revivals in suburban Detroit—not even architecture scholars could have anticipated what they would find. Theirs is the last surviving residence by Alexander Girard (1907–1993), a modernist visionary who made his name in textiles but tried his hand at virtually everything, architecture included. The shoji-like laminate screens, seen in the entryway, are characteristic of his Japanese-influenced work.

White oak slats and cork cladding give texture to the facade of a house that architect Jack Becker designed for himself and his wife, landscape architect Maddie Hoagland-Hanson, in an alley in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C. High awning windows let daylight in while preserving privacy.