The exterior mixes pale gray wood on the vertical volume, and fiber cement and black brick on the horiztonal volume. The three trees in the front yard were maintained during the renovation process.

Strong lines on the floor and the walls reinforce the notion of old and new.

Nicknamed the Floating Farmhouse, this 200-year-old home inspired one former copywriter to delve into architecture as a living. Inside, renovator and owner Tom Givone mixes vintage and industrial decor. Photo by Mark Mahaney.

You may think that a library has to be its own room, but books can be stored and read just about anywhere. Lining a hallway with books turns it into a library that you’ll walk through, and be inspired by, every day. Cabinets below provide extra storage and even a place to sit and read.

The New Old Light by Taiwanese design trio Lin YiHsien, Shih HsiaoChun, and Yeh TingWei is two lights in one—when one pulls the paper portion down from the wood shade, a soft glow morphs into a direct spotlight. The piece is meant to suggest the interplay between simple and complex forms, Eastern and Western style, and old and new aesthetics.

In northern New Jersey, a cramped kitchen is reborn as a welcoming space for cooking and entertaining. Decked out in a subtle yellow, the kitchen houses a Wolf drawer microwave tucked unobtrusively under the counter in the display island.

Adrian Jones and Allison Silverman sit at their reclaimed wood dining table. Eco-mindedness is a matter-of-fact part of everyday life for the couple and the designer, Garrick Jones. “Sustainability comes from flexibility and planning for the long term,” Garrick says. “This is not a glammed-up loft.”

A post-renovation view of the kitchen shows it opening into the family room. Replacing the former white cabinets are Island drawer fronts and wall panelling of teak wood and reclaimed American elm countertop, milled by Vintage Material Supply. The differing grains of the teak veneers and elm countertop vadd complexity and rhythm to the kitchen's wood motif. Stuc Pierre plaster ceiling selected by the homeowner, Sloan Houser, adds an airy feel to the opened space.

An office nook and library can participate in the open plan or disappear behind pocket doors.

In 1962, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architect Arthur Witthoefft won the AIA's highest honor for a home he built in the lush woods of Westchester County. Having fended off a developer's wrecking ball, Todd Goddard and Andrew Mandolene went above and beyond to make this manse mint again.

Alex Gil and Claudia DeSimio created a duplex in an apartment building where they’d been renting for years in Brooklyn, New York, and set to work gutting the interior and adding a new rooftop addition clad in panels of Cor-Ten steel.

Wrapped in Anne Sacks tile, the master bathroom is outfitted with fixtures by Kohler.

Envisioned as "an apartment within an apartment," the master suite is secluded from the rest of the home, accessible via the steel-and-glass catwalk. The owner's sanctuary features a built-in bed and credenza by City.

In the flat’s living room, midcentury modern art and furniture harmonize with the rich floor tiles, opulent molded ceilings. and original pine wood doors. Prints by Gordon Matta-Clark line the wall near a 1950s Danish dining table that’s paired with Eames chairs. A painting by Kuuti Lavonen hangs above a pink chair and ottoman by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.

Homeowners Cecilia Tham and Yoel Karaso renovate their home in Barcelona, harmoniously overlapping elements of the old and the new. Photo by: Gunnar Knechtel

The architects’ two young children occupy this bright bedroom, furnished with Ikea beds. Another custom lamp illuminates the space.

In the living room of the Barcelona apartment designer Elina Vila D’Acosta-Calheiros shares with her husband, Ginés Gorriz, Arne Jacobsen Swan chairs join a sofa by Piero Lissoni for Living Divani. The cabinet is from Cappellini, as is the Marcel Wanders Big Shadow lamp.

"I think an architect’s job is to celebrate what people really care about and simplify and streamline the rest.” —Page Goolrick

A Wolf E-Series steam oven with convection capacity occupies the opposite end of the island. "It's great," Pacek says. "You can steam a whole tray of vegetables at the same time, and it's very quick for reheating. Even though we have a built-in microwave, we often use this for reheating; it's just as quick."

The open wardrobe is simply a bench with a single rod traversing the bedroom.

“The color choice relied on intuition,” says Elizadle. “Wood was the perfect material, and great way to bridge old and new. It’s traditional and really Nordic, an inspiration from a trip to Stockholm a few years ago.”

A set of birch plywood pieces, used to create sliding doors, benches, and storage, added subtle accents and maximized the space. The apartment features a very open floor plan centered around the custom dining room table.

“It was beautiful to see the passage of time in the apartment,” he says, referencing the original tiled floors, which he patched up with newer tiles to create a subtle chromatic shift across the floor.

Elizadle had sensed there was big opportunities when he started the project in January, and found a plenty hidden by previous residents. He said the process was like a selective defoliation, peeling back layers to reveal the inspiring original construction.

Alan Orenbuch and Bryan O’Rourke bought a house and shed, both designed by John M. Johansen, north of New York City in 2009. The shed became a refuge for their many houseguests after an extensive renovation that trimmed the structure to 385 square feet.

Numerous renovations left the 1930s apartment dark, cramped, and confused, a space searching for a strong personality. Stripping the track-marked wood floors and dropped ceilings of the roughly 750-square-foot space revealed a subtle vaulted ceiling and a colorful series of tiles.

Barcelona-based architect Adrian Elizalde embarked on a renovation project for his family’s new apartment. His strategy was to inject some Scandinavian cool on a limited budget, using custom wood pieces and a sparse aesthetic to open things up. Lamps sourced from secondhand stores and a set of Belloch chairs by Santa & Cole are arrayed across the space.

Their creative confections may ruin our diets, but we’re happy to be their taste testers anytime.

Light streams into the bedroom through walls of floor-to-ceiling glass. The windows are triple-glazed, creating a tight, eco-friendly seal.

In this sleek kitchen renovation in San Francisco, the kitchen backsplash is an easy-to-clean glass backsplash that mimics the glossy finish of the surrounding white cabinets. Painters accomplished the high-gloss finish on the cabinets of a kitchen in San Francisco by applying a coat of paint, polishing it with very high-grit sandpaper, repeating the process for each layer, then topping it with three coats of clear varnish. "It’s like an auto body," says builder Jeff King. "It’s incredibly beautiful." The island provides shelving space and storage as well as a second sink, an is topped with pietra grigio marble.

The challenge of renovating an iconic midcentury house is surely a daunting one for any architect, but apply this formula to a Richard Neutra house, and the responsibility rises exponentially. This was the situation for Los Angeles–based architect Peter Grueneisen, founder and principal of Los Angeles–based Nonzero Architecture, who inherited the task of taking on significant updates to an already-altered Neutra—the 1949 Freedman House in Pacific Palisades, California.

Saved from demolition, stripped of awkward alterations, and faithfully restored, these rehabbed homes prove how timeless midcentury design can be.

The original home was preserved and renovated. In the front bedroom, a small window was replaced with a large painted-steel window seat, a favorite of the residents' grandchildren.

At the opposite end of the studio, Framework Architecture created a partially enclosed sleeping nook that is spacious enough to fit a full-size bed.

The large patio leads to a newly landscaped back garden. An expansive glass wall promotes seamless indoor-outdoor living. Inexpensive brick pavers were chosen for the rear patio; they offer textural contrast with the steel of the door, brick of the rear facade, and pale gray wood of the interior floors.

The 1967 beach house—which underwent a meticulous renovation by Bates Masi, the original architect’s firm—is listed as an exclusive holiday rental along the coast of Long Island in New York.