Brammy and Kyprianou hardly touched the front of their house, an 1880 sandstone and brick Victorian with galvanized iron ornamentation.
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.
Juliet Gray, Mathias Kolehmainen, and their sons Cooper and Cyrus have a new favorite hangout: the wide back steps on the addition, which double as theater seating. (They project movies from the second-floor balcony onto an out-building across the yard.)
As a nod to local history, the designers kept the home's original street-facing Victorian facade.
Architect Gregory Phillips retained the old-world charm of original features like the black-and-white floor tiles (seen here in the entryway) and views of the garden from the front door. Photo by Richard Powers.
A wood-burning stove warms the sitting room. Its chimney gives the home a profile in-line with the other houses in the area.
When OB Architecture arrived on the scene, the turn-of-the-20th-century villa was slipping into severe disrepair.
Outside of the extension, the Victorian house’s interior appears largely unchanged. However, NOJI Architecture added a long window to the hallway that connects the extension with the entrance. Light from the extension flows into the rest of the ground floor and connects the new space to its environs.
Abutting the kitchen, the owners’ existing dining chairs, table, and bench have found a new home beneath the extension’s glass planes and plywood structure. Reflective white Terrazo floors further accentuate the airiness of the open-concept extension.
The rear extension, which replaced a somber conservatory, is composed of a series of intersecting triangular planes that draw light into the home. Transitioning from the extension to the garden, chairs and a table by Ikea sit on the cedar-clad deck. In the garden, a bespoke bench by OIKOS Furniture is perched above the granite paving stones.
The Victorian Collection, part of Porcelanosa's Design Series, features several design options, with many donning a reflective surface.
Where possible, original details were preserved and worked into the final design. As the MWAI team describes, window casements were kept intact and interior doors and trims were “carefully removed, stripped, restored and faithfully matched back in the original design.” An original stained glass window is seen in the hallway.
NOJI’s extension houses a brand new kitchen that is anchored by Oikos Furniture cabinetry and a basalt volcanic stone countertop. The kitchen’s fired earth tile backsplash stands out against its plywood surroundings. The island features a Franke sink and Quooker faucet.
"There are obviously no flat walls to put pictures or furniture against. There's quite a lot of useless space, in a way, under the eaves where you can’t really stand up.” Tisdall says. The dressers and balustrades approximate the flat edges of a regular room, while also taking advantage of the low space beneath the eaves.
The old house had suffered several lean-to additions over the years that darkened the interior; these were removed to let in more light. Altogether, the architects retained 818 square feet of the original house and added on another 1,055 square feet, bringing the home’s total imprint to 1,873 square feet.
The architects embraced the modernist form of the new structure instead of cladding the extension in expensive brick to match the original Victorian’s exterior.
The façade of the two-story Victorian home remains unchanged, hiding the extent to which its opposite end has been transformed. NOJI Architects was tasked with remedying the lack of light from the property’s rear garden.
Graphite drawing by Ewan Gibbs depicting San Francisco's Victorians. (2009) Commissioned by the SFMoMA. On display as part of the SFMoMA's 75 Years of Looking Forward: Ewan Gibbs: San Francisco exhibit, on view through June 27, 2010.
The view northeast to the homes across the street from Dwell Home Venice. The neighborhood is an eclectic architectural mix of Craftsman, Victorian, Spanish Colonial Revival, Modern, and more.
A custom OIKOS Furniture window seat is nestled between the extension’s large windows and its latticework structure. Built out of glue-laminated plywood beams, the extension’s diagonal grid provides structural support and visual interest.
The original crown molding and Victorian detailing was left in place. The headboard is made from Elba Blue Marble.
In the living room, a double-height window and a skylight work together to frame a view of the Victorian Gothic church just across the street.
Read in his office.
This double-story addition to a detached Victorian house in Northcote creates a bridge between the existing building and its deep rear garden.
Designed by London-based practice RUSSIAN FOR FISH, this remodeled Victorian home has an almost completely yellow kitchen. Being in this space feels like being immersed in bright sunlight.
Corporate high-flyers and admitted neat freaks Bruce Thatcher and Kirsty Leighton couldn’t handle the chaos anymore. Read more about this Victorian terrace in London here.
The book features another California classic: the Victorian Painted Ladies of San Francisco's Alamo Square.
The powder room is a retreat from the main living areas. The firm set off the Victorian ash storage and mirror unit by surrounding it with black hexagon tile. A "sky tunnel" in the ceiling floods the room with natural light.
The living room in the original house has Victorian details, but the furniture—vintage Bertoia chairs, a Gloss floor lamp by Pablo Pardo, and a Norm 03 Steel Pendant Lamp by Normann Copenhagen—brings the look up to date.
The front door and staircase were painted black to match the Victorian’s steel elements without significantly increasing the renovation costs.
Briggs and Knowles based their design of the oculus on traditional Victorian skylights but tweaked it to fit a more modern sensibility and outfitted it with fluorescent tubing to recreate the effect in the evening.
A steel-finned facade of Triple Fronted Revival wraps the lower-level extension and provides separation from the driveway.
In an attempt to beat the winter blues and improve his work/life balance, Australian architect Andrew Maynard combines his home with his office in a sun-drenched Victorian terrace with bright bursts of yellow.
In 2016, architect Andrew Maynard of Austin Maynard Architects (AMA) decided to transform the way he and his team live and work. At the end of winter, Maynard visited a doctor about his increasing levels of stress and anxiety. The doctor’s suggestion was that he get more vitamin D to improve his mental health. Maynard decided to radically renovate his dark, Victorian-style terrace house in Melbourne, and flood it with therapeutic sunshine.
The housees that circle San Francisco's Buena Vista Park run the gamut from wedding-cake Victorian to Scandinavian modern. Architect Cass Calder Smith aimed to create a façade that contextually relates to the adjacent ornate ones yet is purely modern.
San Francisco’s modernists were faced with the issue of building within a firmly established stylistic tradition—think bay windows and gingerbread. Henry Hill’s 1947 renovation of a 1908 Victorian tucked away on an alley in historic Russian Hill provides a remarkable response to the dilemma.
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