N-01 The program
What the house had to do
The owners bought Fenwick Lane for its street face: clinker brick, steep half-timbered gables and leaded casements. With it came ninety-year-old systems, a maze of service rooms and a kitchen the size of a closet. The brief was simple. Rebuild everything behind the plaster, and 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 meant to be: slow rooms, with fires.
N-02 The materials
The palette, and why
- Reclaimed clinker brick
- Sourced from a demolished 1920s church so the garden side could be extended invisibly.
- Restored leaded casements
- Every original window rebuilt piece by piece by a stained-glass conservator, then weatherstripped.
- Hand-troweled plaster
- Three coats over lath in the front rooms. Drywall would have flattened the light.
- White-oak herringbone
- New floors in the addition, woven seamlessly into the 1928 oak at the threshold.
- Unlacquered brass hardware
- It darkens where hands touch it, so 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. Old wiring, 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 side ran alongside the interior design.
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Permitting 3 months
Heritage board approval, helped by our proposal to restore the casements instead of replacing them.
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Construction 11 months
We set a 12% renovation contingency and spent 9% of it. Old houses always get a vote.
- Final cost vs. signed budget
- 2.7% under (contingency included)
- Move-in vs. promised date
- 1 week early
Fictional figures for a demonstration project. Every project's results
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. It was the rare renovation where the drawings and the invoices told the same story.
Atelier Kane is a fictional firm, invented for this demo.
