SENSITIVE REMODELING: Don't Destroy the Spirit of the Style

It's practically never necessary to completely gut
the interior of a fine old building.

When I was growing up in a small California town, my best friend’s family lived in a charming French Provence-style cottage built around 1935.  It was beautifully constructed, with a steep roof of heavy shakes, tall multi-paned casement windows, and tiled porches. The chimney was surmounted by a handsome pair of clay chimney pots. Inside the house were pegged oak floors, coffered ceilings, mahogany trim, and a good number of arched passageways and niches.

My friend’s house stood in the way of a high-rise bank project, and was condemned under eminent domain laws.  Rather than being torn down, however, someone bought the house with the intention of moving it to another site and renovating it.

Totally gutting an interior makes it easy on contractors
who want to run plumbing, wiring, and ductwork—
but often to the home's permanent detriment.

Sadly, this seemingly happy resolution turned out to be a fate worse than demolition. Like a person, every house has a spirit, a personality imparted to it by the details and quirks of its design. Take those away, and you’ve got what amounts to a stylistic lobotomy. My friend’s house became a case in point.

The new owner wanted to modify the floor plan, so he stripped the interior of its plasterwork, obliterating the archways, coffered ceilings, and mahogany trim in one stroke.  The tile porches succumbed to an inept attempt at dry-rot repair, as did much of the exterior stucco.  As a coup de grace, the marvelously shaggy, moss-grown shake roof was stripped off and replaced with two-dimensional composition shingle.

It may look bad now, but it's perfectly feasible to repair
an interior in this condition without ripping down
the whole place...

By the time the new owner finished this “renovation”, not a scrap remained of the home’s original character. Nor did the manage to add any spirit of his own—the replacement materials he used were of the bargain-warehouse variety you might find in any modern tract house.  

I’m sure the owner didn’t do these things maliciously. He must have admired something about the house, or he wouldn’t have purchased it in the first place. But that only redoubles my wonderment at his remarkably careless renovation. He should have taken the time to learn about the house’s style, and what made it special.

The lesson here is that, as far as remodeling or renovation are concerned, there’s a definite point of no return. When too many charismatic features or idiosyncrasies are stripped away, a house loses the spirit that makes it special.

...and the result will be superior, because you simply can't
capture the feeling of an interior like this one
with modern-day materials.

There are some simple rules of thumb to help prevent such stylistic disasters. In almost no case should renovation require fundamental changes such as moving whole sections of bearing wall or eliminating major windows. Seldom should the interior ever need to be completely gutted. Both of these actions unavoidably obliterate interior finish and trim, which are always integral to the style of a house, and are more often than not impossible to replace in kind.

I’ve already expended thousands of words in prior essays arguing against changes to roofing materials and exterior finish. Often, such changes are made to keep up with some perceived idea of what’s “modern”, but usually, within a few years, they only succeed in making a house look even more dated.

Aside from their devastating esthetic damage, such drastic modifications simply don’t make economic sense. If you really want a brand-new house, it's better to just buy one in the first place.