The house is the principal’s own home, in the Five Fields neighborhood in Lexington that the practice is named for. It was built in the early 1950s by The Architects Collaborative as a custom design for its original owners, who lived in it for sixty years; we are the second family to own it. We found it in a state of disrepair and have been renovating it room by room since we moved in, taking the work in phases as time and family life allow. Each phase has been an occasion to look carefully at what TAC originally drew and to ask what the room wants to be now.
The kitchen was the first phase. As built, it was a closed room connected to the rest of the house only by a single framed opening, which made it impossible to be in the kitchen and with the family at the same time. The wall came down. The kitchen and the living room now read as one room, with the original brick chimney left exposed where it always was and the original wood paneling kept on the far wall. The new cabinetry is plain white casework with a butcher-block counter and a small bar with red stools; the move is to keep the mid-century character of the room and to let the kitchen be a kitchen inside it, rather than to redesign the room around the kitchen.
The walkout basement was the second phase. It had been used as a fourth bedroom and a large undefined space; we kept the fourth bedroom but reorganized it as an office that doubles as a guest room, with a long built-in desk under the clerestory windows and a sofa that opens into a bed against a birch panel wall. The large space became a family room and laundry, with a built-in library wall running the length of the corridor from the stair. The orange shelf-back register, the dark blue desk, and the saturated millwork colors are deliberate — mid-century houses were never neutral, and the new work is allowed to sit alongside the original in its own confident voice.
