Renovations

The open-plan kitchen and living room in the de Gaspé House in Montreal's Villeray neighborhood borrows natural light from a double-height space over the seating area.

Kitchen / Dining Room

Kitchen island

A couple reconfigure a dilapidated Brooklyn brownstone and prepare it for the 21st century.

The white-oak palette continues in the kitchen, where full-height cabinets are made with handcrafted, slatted detailing that wraps up the ceiling, and back down around to an opposite wall of drawers. The island countertop is made of Glassos, a durable, crystal-glass material. It is partially topped with a white-oak slab, with a slight overhang that makes for an apt workspace. The pendants are by Caravaggio, and the dishwasher is by Bosch.

Fraher’s in-house joinery company designed the kitchen cabinets. The majority of the furniture — including the dining table and chairs — is Ligne Roset.

Fields of native grasses connect the main residence, situated at the top of the slope, to the new structures scattered below. A pergola extends from the post-and-beam structure that was maintained during the remodel of the midcentury home.

The team carried the concept of contrast through the exterior, juxtaposing the home’s 125-year-old red brick façade with vertical, black-stained cedar cladding at the back. “We wanted to celebrate the old alongside the new,” Dubbeldam says. Since the house is so well insulated, the extra heat that dark exteriors typically draw doesn’t penetrate beyond the boards’ surface.

Modern cabinet finger pulls in bright and shiny chrome dot the drawers in this sleek kitchen in Venice, California.

On the terrace, an eastern-cedar deck serves as a mid-city oasis.

The owners were passionately involved in every aspect of the design, and pushed the team to make choices they normally might not have, including using Western red cedar for the master bathroom countertop. The spa-like space features a soaking tub, tile from Statements Urban, an MTI sink, a custom mirror, and a Vola faucet.

The custom cedar tub, fabricated by Dovetail, elegantly fits into the master bathroom.

Husband-and-wife ceramic artists, Dear Human, baked x-shaped decals into store-bought Olympia Tile before arranging them in the kids’ bathroom. The tub is by Bette and the sink, set in a Corian countertop, is by Duravit.

“Whenever you’re making a minimal bathroom, you always have issues with storage,” Klug says. The wall-hung Duravitsink leaves no place “to put all your junk,” so Klug and Butz added small shelf above. The space to the right, which appears as an extension of the shelf is actually a panel that hides access to the water tank of the wall-hung toilet, also by Duravit.Photo by Eric Roth

Three’s Company Inspired by the minimal color scheme of a hotel they stayed at in Bali, Winterhalder and Ehlers decided to limit their palette to three colors: anthracite black, concrete gray, and a light larch wood. The first move was to paint the backyard wall gray. Next up for a coat of dark paint was the villa’s old-fashioned wooden staircase, which the couple didn’t like but didn’t have the budget to replace. The consistency works to unite the different styles found in the house. “Somehow,” says Winterhalder, “it all fits.”

An LC4 lounge by Le Corbusier for Cassina keeps company with a trio of large planters and a surfboard in the space between the kitchen and the dining room.

Smith designed the custom cabinets, which were fashioned from medium-density fiberboard with a white lacquer finish. There are three drawer heights. "The faces are consistent but some, when you open them up, are triple-height," Smith says. "So that helps with things that are really large, like sleeping bags or camping stuff or whatever. They're three feet deep, so it goes into the knee wall, which is really handy. So you get lots and lots of storage."

Aaron and Yuka Ruell transformed a 1950s Portland ranch house into a retro-inspired family home with plenty of spaces for their four children to roam. In the kitchen, interior designer Emily Knudsen Leland replaced purple laminate cabinets with flat-sawn eastern walnut, and added PentalQuartz countertops in polished Super White for contrast. The kitchen island is clad with original red tiles, and hanging cabinets above it were removed to maximize light and family-room views.