Home Renovation Tip: Get an Understanding of What’s Already Around

Emilio Fuscaldo sits in the garden outside the brick house that he designed for himself and his partner, Anna Krien, on a small subdivided lot in Coburg, a suburb north of Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Nic Granleese.

Karen White, David MacNaughtan, and their sons, Griffin and Finlay, hang out on the front deckof their narrow home in Toronto’s leafy Roncesvalles neighborhood. A narrow modernist composition of glass panes and purple brick, the house slips like a bookmark between two older buildings, a bright three-story abode on a lot narrower than most suburban driveways. Photo by Dean Kaufman. Read more about the small house here.

At over 500 square feet, the house’s green roof may be its most powerful—and most expensive—environmental statement. It cost $8,000 to waterproof, and $7,000 to landscape. Water from the roof feeds the toilet and the garden’s watering system, and the garden itself insulates the house and keeps gas bills low in winter. Photo by Nic Granleese.

Since surrounding neighbors can overlook the one-story property, Thomson created a roof detail that is environmentally friendly and attractive: “the bio-diverse [green] roof is planted with indigenous species of flowers and grasses,” he says.

The open-plan home’s core is the towering chimney—clad in the same double-long, thin bricks that sheathe the Kolumba museum in Cologne, Germany. It holds three fireplaces, a conventional oven, and a pizza oven; all vent into three distinct flues, emerging from the chimney as their own kind of architectural statement. Inside, life revolves around the brick chimney, which the architect surrounded with a concrete counter that wraps from the kitchen to the living area. The stools are vintage.

It's traditional among homes in the region to enter through their backdoor, seen here. The door leads directly to the living room.

The Brick screen by Eileen Gray for Aram Designs blocks off a small office from the dining room.

A brick fireplace feature creates a low window from the kitchen into the living room to keep a connection between the rooms without relying on a completely open floor plan. Energy-efficient MR16 halogen lights are recessed into the wood ceiling to further emphasize the clean lines throughout the interior spaces.

Blogger and stylist Annaleena Leino Karlsson has designed her 1950s farmhouse to have a mostly white interior. Her workspace is next to a rustic brick and stucco fireplace, which is adorned with cacti and decorative objects.

The lower level is covered in traditional red brick, while the upper level consists of coil-coated aluminium sheet with large glass panes.

Fuscaldo and Krien found an old workbench and used the wood to create the counter around the kitchen sink. Photo by Nic Granleese.

The facade of a house in Belgium consists of "knitted bricks." “In this part of Belgium, 90 percent of the houses are built with brick,” says architect Tom Verschueren. “It’s a classic material that we tried to use in House BVA in a totally different way.”

The rear of the house features Victorian brick, a modern extension, and Velfac windows. Landscape designer Matthew Wright was inspired by the art of Henri Rousseau when choosing plants to set amid the garden’s Dorset pebbles.

The residence is set back a few feet from the site’s edge, allowing more light to flood into neighbors’ windows and leaving space for trees. “The idea was to make a strong gesture to incorporate ideas of openness,” Lynch explains. “It’s not just a box if you look at it closely. It’s a series of planes that fit together."

This Victorian-era home in Melbourne, renovated by OOF! Architecture, maintains privacy from the street, but does so in an unusually "friendly" manner—with a giant brick wall that spells out "Hello," a collaboration with local artist Rose Nolan. The residents wanted their house to appeal to passersby, since it sits on a well-trafficked block near a café.

The travertine floor for the guest bedroom came from a De La Espada showroom in Soho. When moving stores, the owners were considering throwing out their travertine floor, but Dealtry offered to install it in his home. Along with exposed ceiling beams, the tiles provide a sense of texture and warmth to the space. Photo by Tara Donne.

The placement of the windows creates sight lines across the 4,770-square-foot structure. Northern Wide Plank sourced the reclaimed hemlock for the facade; Sherma Construction picked the specific boards to create a cohesive look. - North Hatley, Quebec Dwell Magazine : July / August 2017

Green Thumb Sherman’s back garden is a model of adaptive reuse: The path is made from rubble bricks and concrete dug up from the backyard and crushed, and the bench is made from reclaimed cast-iron panels and mahogany scraps left over from replacing the interior stair treads.

A sun-soaked reading corridor connects the living pavilion to the sleeping pavilion (seen in front).

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Since the site used to house a brickyard, brick walls with cut-outs are one of the primary building materials.

White brick exterior of Goddard and Mandolene’s home post renovation.

Tribeca Manufacturing Building New York–based architect Andrew Franz undertook the renovation of a landmark circa-1884 former soap warehouse in Tribeca, originally designed by George W. DaCunha in the Romanesque Revival style. Franz reorganized and modernized the six-story building—which retains its original 16-foot beam ceilings, brick walls, timber columns, and elevator winches from the former freight shaft—by incorporating steel, glass, handmade tile, and lacquer to complement the masonry and heavy timber. An interior courtyard and rectangular mezzanine are situated below the original 16-foot gull-wing ceiling planes.

Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP used 87 translucent bricks to reframe a family’s connection to nature and the city.

“Brick was such a good material for this project,” says Hughes’s partner, architect Heather Rowell. “It creates a rhythm and simplicity on the outside—a mathematical rigor—but on the inside, it’s so easy to set up a playful contrast with bright white drywall.”

“The dogtooth wall has a dynamic quality that a lot of people have a really wonderful reaction to,” notes architect and resident Giles Bruce.

To reduce the budget, Hyde used cement fibre sheeting as an alternative to concrete blocks.

Spanning a mere 11 feet, this Brooklyn row house known as Little House, Big City has been strategically transformed to accommodate the needs of a young family of four.

Merritt Amanti Palminteri and Rogers Hawley revamped their Monterey bungalow without expanding its footprint.

The brick-and-glass residence accommodates limited mobility with a lift between levels and seamless thresholds between indoors and out.