The clients wanted more room for a growing family without leaving Arlington, where they had built their life around a particular street and a particular neighborhood. The house they owned was a 1930s colonial with four rooms over four rooms — well built, tightly planned, and out of room. Rather than move, they asked us to make the house twice as large by working into the deep backyard.
We doubled the footprint with an addition pulled to the rear lot line, adding fourteen hundred square feet of new construction to the fourteen hundred we already had. The new volume reads as its own object — a tall gable wrapped in dark gray HardiePlank, with a deep overhanging eave shading a full-height glazed wall on the main level and a small private balcony off the master suite above. Where the original colonial faces the street with the manners of its neighbors, the addition faces the yard with its own contemporary register; the two volumes meet at the original chimney, which is left exposed in the new living room as a record of the old back wall.
Inside, the work let the original kitchen expand into the former dining room, which now reads as a kitchen, dining, and living wing running the full depth of the house and out to the deck. An enclosed side porch on the original house, used as a back hall by a previous owner, was brought up to the level of the first floor and rebuilt as a mudroom and powder room. A new basement under the addition gave the family a finished lower level; the master suite occupies the second floor of the addition with its own balcony.
