In a particular San Antonio, Texas, neighborhood, one home has long stood out. Surrounded by towering, traditional-style homes in neutral colors, it has a low-slung profile, metal roof, and red brick exterior.

“It’s an iconic house in the neighborhood,” says architect Vicki Yuan of Lake|Flato Architects, who isn’t necessarily referring to its appearance. Built in 1949, the midcentury-modern home was designed by “Texas’s godfather of modern design,” O’Neil Ford. His interest in the English Arts and Crafts Movement was flavored with an appreciation for International Style, which resulted in homes that combined local handicraft, a connection with the landscape, and streamlined detailing. He was also an enthusiastic preservationist, and was recognized as such by actually being named a National Historic Landmark himself in 1974, an honor only he has achieved to this day.

Yet in spite of Ford’s stature, this home “was being marketed as a teardown,” says its newest owner, reflecting on the first time he and his wife walked through the property in 2021.

Before: Exterior Front

After: Exterior Front

By that point, the home had been tweaked substantially. The attached carport had been turned into additional living space, the front door had been moved, and a sunken den with several awkwardly angled walls was added toward the rear. There was plenty of square footage, but the bedrooms and kitchen were small, while the living rooms—including a formal one, the sunken space, and the converted carport—were large and redundant.

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

“I grew up for a period of time in an O’Neil Ford house,” says the husband. “Ford also designed the high school that my wife and I went to, so we’ve always had an affinity. But then we went and saw this house and we were like, This is rough. This doesn’t scream O’Neil Ford.”

With so many ’70s-era changes, including the dysfunctional layout, they weren’t convinced they should make the purchase until they brought over Yuan, who lived down the street from them at the time. The couple were having their second child, and needed more space than their current Craftsman provided. Its kitchen was right next to the nursery, and even doing something as innocuous as getting ice after the baby’s bedtime proved too disruptive. As soon as Yuan saw the Ford house, even with the odd-shaped sunken living room, she had ideas.

“We came around to the fact that it was a good thing the house wasn’t so O’Neil Ford, because some of them are like museum pieces and you don’t want to mess with them,” says the husband. “This one felt not so precious. Then we started talking to Vicki, and she was the one who really put a fire in us. She immediately knew what to do with the weird floor plan and all the angles.”

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

After: Dining Room

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The house has two angled wings flanking a central core with living spaces, with walls of windows to the front and back that connect the house to its tree-filled lot and backyard pool. Yuan’s redesign creates a gradation of function, allotting an enlarged primary suite and a guest room/office to one wing. She turned the enclosed carport into the children’s wing, complete with two bedrooms, a shared bathroom, and a fenced courtyard off the front that screens the windows. The dining room was incorporated into the living area, the kitchen enlarged and a breakfast nook added, and the sunken living room kept in place, granted with a makeover.

“Our challenge was, how do we marry this big cavernous addition with this more modestly scaled midcentury house?” says Yuan. “We did it with materials that encourage flow through the space.” Now, custom white oak cabinetry anchors the corner of the dining room, extends into the kitchen, and steps down into the sunken den to “guide you through the space,” says Yuan. “It marries all these disparate parts of the house together.”

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

Before: Breakfast Nook

After: Breakfast Nook

In keeping with Ford’s ethos, local craftspeople were used throughout, from masonry and terrazzo to custom metal railings and millwork. Interior designers Kelley Perumbeti and Michael Yarinsky of Office of Tangible Space, a studio in Brooklyn and San Francisco, added to the artisanal backdrop with things like artist-molded ceramic house numbers at the curb and a custom mural that leads to the children’s wing, which even has a blank space for the girls to fill in one day.

Before: Sunken Living Room

After: Sunken Living Room

For the sunken living room, Perumbeti and Yarinsky fashioned a custom two-sided sofa, its size and shape responding to the scale and angles of the awkward room. Now the family loves watching TV here, and the sofa holds up to rambunctious play. “The first time the kids saw it, they jumped all over it, which is exactly what we were going for,” says Yarinsky. “It’s meant to be a lot of different things, so it was important to land on a design that was both elegant and very playful.”

Before: Sunken Living Room

After: Sunken Living Room

Before: Rear Balcony

After: Rear Balcony

In the dining room, a table by Miniform chosen to seat a gaggle of family members for holidays sits below a Puffball Cloud Pendant chandelier by Faye Toogood. It can be seen through the front and back windows, acting as a “beacon” that underscores Ford’s original intent to connect the house to its site. From the driveway, “You see this glowing light and it pulls your sightline all the way through to the backyard,” says Perumbeti.

Before: Enclosed Carport

After: Children’s Wing

Now, what was once the “weird low house in the middle of the block,” as Yuan used to call it, has been transformed into a “a joyous synthesis of its peculiar history,” says the architect.

Take the hall bathroom, with its preserved tile and fixtures, which were given a pop of red paint for a fun surprise: “It’s the perfect metaphor for what we were all trying to do, which was to marry the old and new,” says Yuan. “That’s the goal of any renovation in my mind. To blur them, so that a home feels right and timeless.”