N-01 The program
What the house had to do
The owners bought Fenwick Lane for its street face — clinker brick, steep gables, leaded casements — and inherited ninety-year-old systems, a warren of service rooms, and a kitchen the size of a closet. The brief: rebuild everything behind the plaster, touch nothing you can see from the sidewalk.
The plan opened the back of the house to the garden with a modest, well-mannered addition, moved the kitchen into the light, and returned the front rooms to what they were always meant to be — slow rooms, with fires.
N-02 The materials
The palette, and why
- Reclaimed clinker brick
- Sourced from a demolished 1920s church to extend the garden elevation invisibly.
- Restored leaded casements
- Every original window rebuilt cam-by-cam by a stained-glass conservator, then weatherstripped.
- Hand-troweled plaster
- Three-coat over lath in the front rooms — drywall would have flattened the light.
- White-oak herringbone
- New floors in the addition, toothed seamlessly into the 1928 oak at the threshold.
- Unlacquered brass hardware
- It darkens where hands touch it — the house keeps its own diary.
N-03 The timeline
As it actually ran
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Discovery 6 weeks
We opened walls before pricing. Knob-and-tube, a sagging beam and 1970s 'repairs' were found on paper, not mid-build.
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Design & documents 5 months
Heritage-review drawings for the street elevation ran in parallel with interior design.
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Permitting 3 months
Heritage board approval — helped by proposing to restore, not replace, the casements.
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Construction 11 months
A 12% renovation contingency was set; 9% was spent. Old houses always vote.
N-04 The collaboration
With Atelier Kane
Atelier Kane, heritage specialists, held the architectural line while our preconstruction team priced three versions of the addition before the heritage board saw one. Their conservation report became our scope-of-work — the rare renovation where the drawings and the invoices told the same story.
“They treated a ninety-year-old house like a client with opinions. It got its vote — and we got a home that works.”