For young urban couples, the decision to have children means envisioning the ideal environment in which to raise them. And often, it’s not the city. That was the case for Brooklynites Julian King, AIA, and his wife and business partner Christina Lyons, who a few years ago began searching for a quiet, leafy location within a 40-minute commute of New York City, where they work. The 1926 Dutch Colonial home they settled on was in the worst shape of any they looked at—a rotting teardown with leaky roofs and a rear deck that barely clung to the house. Yet it had its charms. Among them were good bones, a pleasant southern exposure, and a canopy of pine trees that afforded some privacy. While the idea of a full-scale renovation and addition was daunting, Julian felt he could truly experiment with this project.
“Emblematic of the state of the house, a vine had grown into the basement through a11/2-inch gap between the concrete block foundation and the wood sill plate, thriving in front of a small window,” he recalls. “It was so absurd, it was the genesis of an idea.”
Beneath the Dutch Colonial trim and false eaves, the house revealed itself as a pure square form containing a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor and two bedrooms and a bath above. Julian (who did most of the work himself) stripped it to its skeleton. On the east side of the house, he also took off the sunroom that sat on top of the basement-level garage. And the house’s entire rear south wall was rebuilt 3 feet out to accommodate a new hallway in the cantilevered second floor.
To shore up the foundation, he used epoxy-coated rebar and filled empty CMU foundation walls with concrete, adding embedded sill plate anchor bolts. After a few tweaks to interior and exterior walls, the main house room locations remained much the same. “I put on a new, simple gable roof with two slopes and focused on the addition,” he says. The 300-square-foot addition—a sculptural, stucco-clad volume—incorporates a playroom/office where the sunroom stood, and a primary suite on top.
Between Old and New
Abstracted contextual elements bring creativity to this colonial-style house. In addition to the intrepid vine—more on that later—Julian was inspired by a Cezanne painting, “Mont Sainte-Victorie with Large Pine,” in which tree branches in the foreground mimic the shape of a distant mountain. “Beautiful pine branches hung over the left side of the tiny garage,” he says. “I could tell I wanted to put something above the garage, where the light coming through the foliage was so nice. It hit me the first day I saw it, and all the studies I did became about making the profile of the tree branches and location of tree trunks generate the shape of the addition.” What followed was an appendage whose bulging outer wall skirts a tree canopy, and a giant skylight that traces the arc of the branching above it.
The weed he noticed growing out of a foundation gap on his initial visit called to mind the Japanese concept of engawa—a space neither inside nor outside. That idea took shape as a glassy slot between the house and addition. At the end of the second-floor hallway, you step into a bright, liminal space where the addition pulls away from the house—an effect created by a glass floor and bar-shaped skylight. Turning left takes you into the primary bedroom under the sweep of a second skylight. “It’s a wonderful promenade of starting to go upstairs in a typical cellular house,” Julian says. “Then you see this skylit wall at a bit of an angle, and, boom, you are in the trees.”
Another gap occurs outside the primary bath, where full-height glass next to the exposed brick chimney looks out on a planter containing a Japanese maple. At the back of the house, a second planter sits on a ledge that the stucco addition seems to rest on. From his bedroom, the couple’s son can reach out to water the tree and watch it grow.
A mitered, three-sided window on the primary bedroom’s outer front corner enhances the illusion of being in the sky. Made of half-inch tempered glass with silicone joints, it overcomes condensation issues with a heat-tracing cable fixed to the custom steel frame. The cable warms the frame and glass when outside temperatures dip below 32 degrees, and a radiator under the window seat warms the glass’s interior surface.
“There are a lot of details in the house that look simple but took effort,” Julian says. The biggest puzzle was the bedroom skylight. Flat with a curve on one edge, it measures 15 feet long on its straight side and 7 feet at its widest point and is just high enough to edit out views of neighboring roofs. He used a traditional plumb bob to plot the profile of a tree branch onto huge pieces of paper, then generated a smooth curve on CAD, using the plumb bob again to extrapolate the arc in a full-scale plan template.
“I printed the drawings full scale and made tweaks,” he says. “It was tricky to get the curve right, and we craned it in, just as it was about to snow.” Executing the wall curve was equally tricky. Julian wet two layers of Sheetrock, bending it repeatedly over many days and then skim coating to refine the shape. And to eliminate distracting reflections of interior framing on the glass’s 45-degree angle, everything behind the plastered wall was painted matte black.
Light Touch
Inside, the aesthetic is minimalist, with white walls and reclaimed white oak millwork, light pine floors in the original house, and concrete floors in the addition. In the kitchen, which is still in progress, a 4-foot-wide pocket door opens to the dining room, where a large frameless window and built-in seat look out to the south-facing backyard. The upper-floor cantilever creates a sheltered entry onto the Garapa deck that spans the back of the house. Its detailing reinforces the relationship between old and new: constructed of interwoven 18- and 16-foot boards, the deck joints align along an overlap between the house and addition. Julian left the deck in its natural state to complement the reclaimed barnwood siding, which slips inside on both floors to mark the transition between old and new.
Opposite the dining area, an airy room in the addition can double as a playroom or a den with built-in bookshelves and a fold-down desk. Full-height sliding doors open to the deck, and a recessed track in the deep soffit holds a sliding screen, creating an indoor-outdoor experience.
An existing steel-plate spiral staircase ascends to the bedroom level, outfitted with a similar modernist economy. The primary bath, for example, contains a sleek trough sink and a custom cedar-and-glass door that opens to the tree planter. Its bottom track is hidden in the side of the house, enabling the door to disappear when open. The other bath holds a tub set into a curving Corian surround.
Adding to the clean and uncluttered effect, the home’s side windows were installed with textured glass that blurs views of the neighboring properties. “The light is refracted and really nice; glowing light fills the interiors without a need for blinds or shades,” Julian says. “We rarely turn the lights on.”
While the glassy slot is most fully experienced internally, the juxtaposition of old and new is immediately visible on the outside. If the addition’s white, flat surface and glass insertions embody contemporary notions about living with nature, the original house’s reclaimed board siding was a way to acknowledge and update the past.
It is part of a wall system that sealed the drafty old house with plywood sheathing covered in a waterproof membrane and rigid insulation. Over those layers, Julian used vertical and horizontal wood nailers to create a ventilated gap behind the barnwood siding—a nod to the region’s agricultural history. While the contemporary rainscreen assembly allowed for a flush installation that emphasizes the dwelling’s simple form, the full-height boards recall traditional barn detailing.
Likewise, the 12-foot-tall, pivoting front door is clad in the same material and set flush in the exterior wall. Julian built the garage door out of wood, to which he fastened sheets of hot-rolled steel. By contrast, the application of the addition’s stucco, which dried quickly and involved scaffolding, was one of the few things the architect couldn’t do on his own.
For Julian, this project gave him not just creative license but the satisfaction of building it himself. “I don’t know if I’ll ever leave this house,” he says. “The skylight is fun at night. Sometime our son lies back with us and we watch planes from Newark Airport, and their trails. Sometimes a hawk flies over. It’s my little manifesto on how a building can be part of its context.”
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New + Old House
Outside New York City
Architect: Julian King AIA, Julian King Architect, Brooklyn, New York
Builder: Julian King, AIA
Interior designer: Julian King, AIA, and Christina Lyons
Project size: 1,800 square feet
Site size: 0.18 acre
Construction cost: Withheld
Photography: Julian King Architect
Key Products
Cladding: Reclaimed barnwood, limestone stucco
Decking: Garapa
Door hardware/lockets: ABH, RBA, Kevo, Rejuvenation
Exterior door: Siena Woodworks
Faucets: Fantini, Jaclo (showerhead)
Glazing: Bear Glass, Starphire, Glass Flooring Systems
HVAC: Fujitsu mini-splits, Steamview radiators by Runtal, Warmly Yours radiant floor mats
Lighting: USAI, WAC
Lighting control system: Lutron
Paints/stains: Benjamin Moore
Passage doors: Studco
Roofing: IB Roof Systems (PVC flat-roof addition), asphalt shingle (old house)
Sinks: Corian, Rohl
Skylights: Solar Innovations, Pella
Solid surfacing: Corian
Special surfacing: Tadelakt
Toilets: Caroma
Tubs: Hydro Systems with custom Corian surround
Weatherproofing: Tyvek, CDX ply
Windows: Marvin, Andersen
Wood floors: Vermont Plank Flooring
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