Collection by Marissa Porter
Renovations
Berkus has gone through over 1,000 renovations in his career and has learned some key design lessons along the way. “I have such a passion for discovering and reusing vintage building materials and architectural savage,” Berkus says. “In my last home in New York, I found a set of four doorknobs with locks from Belgium in the 1940s and I had iron glass doors installed to work around them. I knew myself to know that the knobs I touched everyday would be something meaningful to me.”
Pictured, an enclosed porch in a rundown rustic cabin in Big Bear, California, updated by Lukas Machnik. Photo courtesy NBC.
The addition references the main house in materiality and function. "We did not want to simply copy the existing elements, so we explored and investigated different levels of faithfulness to the existing structure, from a very near emulation to a much more contemporary approach that would only quote the previous architecture in some key aspects," Grueneisen says.