Spaulding Square

This clapboard cottage is set in a neighborhood of modest, one-story Period Revival style houses built in the early 1920s. We were hired to expand and update the home while preserving its classical detailing and working within the strictures of historic preservation codes.

The new master bedroom opens to the shade of a huge back-yard avocado while new skylights bring light into formerly dark bathrooms and hallways. The spacious new family room and kitchen also give on to generous backyard decks. Painted wood wainscots, crown and ogee base moldings were all restored or replicated, maintaining a connection to the past in the newly modernized spaces. The owner added their eclectic furnishings, artwork and book collections to make a design statement that owes more to their individuality than to the rigid historicism favored by the local historic preservation committee.

The rear yard, dominated by the tree and the new, sprawling hardwood deck was landscaped in minimal style with gravels, reeds, grasses and some tropicals. At the front, homage was paid to the open, lawned suburbs of the last century with a small (but thirsty) rectangle of sod.

Credits: Garden Design, Sarah Munster