Our homes reveal a lot about us, and anyone who’s added to or remodeled an old home knows that the changed elements speak volumes, charged with the task of straddling the old and new. Three recent remodels are notable for the healthy distance they establish between the original home and the new addition—the architects don’t disrespect the existing structures but aren’t beholden to their limitations either. We talked to the homes’ architects and owners to get their takes on the remodels.

A Simple Calm

Clay and Whitney Langdon’s home is easy to miss. Set far back on its expansive lot and built in the forties, the white house with its inviting porch feels quaint compared to some of the more towering structures in this part of Tarrytown. But once you enter the house, you sense at once that the Langdons’ recent remodel isn’t about calling attention to itself: where there had been a large backyard, there is now a smaller one filled with a white stucco box that is now the Langdons’ peaceful, hushed bedroom. From the street, nothing about the addition is showy or even evident.

The couple, who have children aged six and eight, sought to transform their home, which they bought five years ago, from a cozy two-bedroom, two-bathroom into something that would accommodate the extra space they needed. At the same time, the Langdons strove to keep their cool, spare aesthetic at the forefront, which gave birth to the box that contains their bedroom and bathroom. A short hallway connects the previously existing structure of the house—the inviting kitchen, the children’s bedrooms—to Whitney’s trim office and then their bedroom. To call the addition a simple “box,” however, is inadequate. Mell Lawrence and Scott Smith, the architects of the remodel, put a literal kink in the walls—there is a slight bend in the wall that ushers you into the bedroom, guiding you gently into the room. The adjoining wall also has a bend to it. The subtle arcs create a vibrant, kinetic energy that, with the play of light from the floor-to-ceiling windows, imparts life to the space.

The entire house is a temple of white. The wood floors have a gauzy coat of whitewash over them; the cabinetry, bathrooms and back patio are all white (and not gradations of white—Decorators White by Benjamin Moore was used throughout). But the home is far from severe or forbidding and is instead warm and soothing. There is also a notable lack of clutter anywhere in the house. “There are so many household objects left out in homes that people don’t see anymore because they’re so used to them,” like clunky appliances, Lawrence points out. “One of Whitney’s goals was to get rid of that—then, your eye goes directly to the shape of the chair,” for example. It’s a subtle effect, but one that creates a “simple calm,” Lawrence says. “I grew up in more of an old, English-style home, and when I saw modern architecture, it was thrilling,” Whitney says. “I think some of our key words during the remodel were ‘disappear’ and ‘simple.’”

One House, Two Personalities

Like a number of the houses on his street just off South Congress, Paul Stekler’s Arts & Crafts bungalow is intimate. It has dark, old wood floors, with some light that enters the house but no surplus of it. But enter Stekler’s house and head straight to the back, and the house opens up into what feels like another house, the same size as the one you first entered. That new house is filled with light, jutting angles and architectural insights into the property, which his home’s original architects, with their tendency to plant as many boxy bungalows as they could, never realized. The new addition is a long and narrow two-story space that feels roomy and uses Stekler’s rectangular lot effectively. “How do you create an addition that is ultimately small and make it feel open?” architect Murray Legge remembers asking himself when he created Stekler’s addition, which is less than 1,000 square feet and only eight feet wide at its narrowest. The obvious answer was to put a lot of windows in the new space.

But anyone can add a bunch of windows to a house. Legge argues that it’s the placement of the windows that matters. There are windows that face upward; when Stekler wakes up, the sky is the first thing he sees. Some windows peek into hidden corners of the property, and some bend around a heritage oak tree a City of Austin arborist declared untouchable (and that Legge and Stekler didn’t want to disturb anyway). The addition faces north, which allowed Legge to refrain from installing window treatments. Legge wanted the addition to embody “a strong connection with the exterior,” a space that “engages the outside.” Because the outdoors seem to enter the house so fully, you feel as if you’ve spent the afternoon outside when you’ve really been sitting at Stekler’s dining room table. Because the addition employs the backyard, “it makes the house feel three times as big as it was,” Stekler says. “It makes use of this property in a way I never thought of, and the expanding of the old and new is quite beautiful.”

“It’s balanced out with the old house,” Legge says of the new space and the “old Austin intimate Arts and Crafts” style of the original house. “The addition was meant to complement the house in that way, these two different personalities.”

The Canvas

Nestled in the Delwood Duplex District is a house, which, at first glance, blends seamlessly with its neighbors. In fact, its minimalist concrete block exterior is a testament to the postwar housing boom of the late 1940s that left another 59, seemingly identical duplexes in the vicinity. Upon further inspection, however, distinctive details begin to emerge— the beautiful windows in place of stacked doors, the roof’s clean lines free of decorative trim—and hint at the intriguing space inside. Collaborating with Eric Barth and Ryan Burke of A Parallel Architecture, homeowners Heather Otten and Katherine Loeb remodeled the duplex into a singlefamily home with a character of its own.

Throughout the remodel, Barth and Burke sought to maintain the home’s historic quality and aesthetic continuity with its neighbors. “Given the iconic location, our work extended beyond the walls of the house,” Burke says. “It was a thoughtful response to the broader context of the neighborhood.” Rather than drastically reshaping the exterior, they thus focused on creating a warm and inviting interior. Barth and Burke deconstructed the duplex’s original, stacked plan, which required a series of calculated moves, from expanding the dining room to turning a downstairs bedroom into a spacious kitchen. At the heart of the remodel is the double-height living space that was built to fill out the L-shaped layout of the duplex. Though only 400 square feet, the bright and airy room, which connects to the backyard and newly added pool through wide, sliding glass doors, transformed the house entirely. “It created this open, modern plan in what was previously a very tight, dark, room to-room home,” Barth observes. “With a couple of simple moves, we unlocked the hidden potential of the existing structure.”

The warmth of the added living space continues into the rest of the home, which effortlessly brings together old and new elements: inspired by the texture and rich palette of the original white oak wood floors upstairs, for example, Barth and Burke added white oak flooring throughout the rest of the home. “There’s no line in the sand of old versus new,” Barth notes. In line with the duplex’s modernist sensibilities, the home also maintains an elegant simplicity, free of unnecessary architectural flourishes, in order to showcase the furniture and pieces of art Otten and Loeb have thoughtfully selected. Over the course of the day, sunlight enters through the home’s airy windows, playing off the staircase, walls and artwork. “The interior of the home becomes a canvas,” Barth remarks.