renovation and addition

Located in a leafy residential neighborhood of Pasadena not far from the Huntington Museum, the Greenwood house project started as a modest window replacement project and eventually evolved into an extensive whole house remodel.

The existing house was constructed in the 1920’s and added onto over time, ultimately producing an eclectic mixture of diverse architectural vocabularies and awkward forms and spaces.

Photography by Lucy Gonzales

Bugetary and zoning considerations limited the work to mostly within the existing building footprint. Within that framework, the goal in this project was to transform the existing home by:

• Establishing a unifying architectural vocabulary that also responded to the buildings existing asymmetric form and provided balance

• Increasing the physical and visual connections to the outdoors and increasing the quantity and quality of usable outdoor space, allowing outdoor spaces to become extensions of the indoors

• Creating larger open flexible spaces to accommodate informal modern living

• Remedy the existing structural deficiencies in the back of the house

These design goals were achieved by:

• Revising the interior layout of the home combining series of small rooms and closets into larger open flexible spaces

• Strategically redesigning the exterior of the house by reworking window and door sizes and their placement. Incorporate new materials and colors to articulate building volumes and architectural elements

• Reworking access to private front garden, creating a new-cantilevered deck to provide an outdoor extension of the kitchen/ dining area.

• Creating a new private second floor terrace off the Master Bedroom behind an existing parapet by removing and replacing an old pitched roof with a new terrace

• Enclosing an existing sun porch, and adding new shear walls to structurally stabilize the house

Awards: 2009 Pasadena AIA Merit Award + Jury Comments
I love the craft of this project. Each interior and exterior elevation has been skillfully and artfully touched resulting in an interlocking composition of space and material that has an elegant zen-like quality.
NORMAN MILLAR

A skillful and rigorous assemblage of disparate parts into an elegant whole.
COLEMAN GRIFFITH

This remodel completely transforms the experience of what might have been a "tear down" while preserving much of the original spatial and structural elements of the building.  A great example of why not to start over.  Every space has a simple yet significant intervention, nothing appears overdone or wasteful.  Indoor/Outdoor relationships are powerful and offer different experiential opportunities.
KIRSTIN MURRAY