“There he is! There’s my hawk!” Honora Dunham gasps as I step inside the home she shares with her husband, Ted Power, and their two young daughters, Rita and Jean, in Long Island City, Queens. Holding her eldest on her hip, Honora runs to the back of the house through the open-plan first floor toward the rear wall—a wood-trimmed puzzle of floor-to-ceiling windows. I follow Honora’s gaze to a bird perched, stoic, in the pouring rain. “They’re called peregrines,” she explains, and this one is a repeat visitor.

It is not surprising that the first thing I noticed inside Ted and Honora’s home was the outside. “The whole house is oriented to the back,” says architect Keith Burns, who wanted the renovation to feature a view of the yard (which he finds “fantastic” but “in a weird, cool way”). The rear lot is hemmed in by three masonry walls of about the same, one-and-a-half-story height. This fortuitous alignment of neighboring industrial buildings creates something of “an even datum,” says Burns, “kind of like framing the sky.”

When Honora, who works in design marketing, and Ted, who works in green tech, were searching for a house in 2017, it seemed impossible to find what they were looking for. “A lot of people move to the suburbs so they can have more space,” notes Ted, who considered fixing up an old factory building in Massachusetts. So when the couple found this house, they acted quickly: “We saw it on a Friday and we had an offer in on Saturday.” Still, the 19th-century semidetached clapboard home came with water damage, shag carpets, and drop ceilings. The only access to the backyard was from the same floor as the home’s single bathroom: the basement. The building had to be stripped to its studs.

“We weren’t trying to use a bunch of fine materials in this house,” says Honora of the home’s plywood, pine, and terra-cotta features; the facade is made with galvanized corrugated metal. All of the appliances are electric, one of several sustainable measures introduced during the renovation. The roof is equipped with solar panels, and an energy recovery ventilation system works in tandem with the home’s improved insulation. (The original walls were “Swiss cheese,” Honora recalls.)

Configuring a new interior layout within the house’s original framing required creativity. “We wanted to fit a lot of stuff in a space where there hadn’t been that much stuff,” Honora says of the renovation plan. Keith employed a grid to organize the home’s second floor—adding rooms that are compact but not constrained. A semiwinding staircase stretches to the first floor, where all existing walls were removed to create one open space from the front door to the back.

“We’re a family. Things are changing all the time.”
—Honora Dunham, resident

In the basement, a workshop houses old tools that Ted sourced from across the Eastern Seaboard and restored to their full capabilities. “This is the machine that’s going to build the house for us,” says Honora of prospective projects the couple has in mind for the home, like a built-in sofa for the living room. “Sometimes I would like to have everything at once. And the ultimate thing is, actually, it doesn’t work that way,” she says. “We’re a family. Things are changing all the time.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Keith Burns Architect PLLC

Builder: Black Square Builders

Structural Engineering: ASE Engineering PLLC

Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing: LL Engineering P.C.

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They Didn’t Want to Leave the City, So They Updated a Home to Channel the Suburbs