Robert Swatt, FAIA, agrees. His firm, Swatt | Miers Architects in Emeryville, Calif., transformed a tired 1970s house in San Francisco’s South Bay area while reusing the foundation and two-thirds of the framing, including the pitched roofs. While out-of-character for the modernist firm, the angled roofs worked well for the new solar panels, he says, and the combination of pitched and flat roofs added up to something fresh. “By putting our own architectural language with an older language, we created something we never would have come up with had we started from scratch. It was a happy surprise,” Swatt says. “It cost a lot of money, but for the owner it was an ethical issue, not a cost issue.”
home economics
Not all clients have the forethought to buy a house with future remodeling in mind. If they did, they could avoid the wasted money and embodied energy inherent in knocking down to build new, says architect and real estate curator John Brown, RAIC, founder of housebrand in Calgary, Alberta. With post-crash consumers opening up to an intelligent, utilitarian design approach, Brown’s goal is to help people achieve a high-quality home at a reasonable cost. He believes it rarely makes economic sense to demolish a house unless it’s small and broken down. If you’re spending $300,000 to $400,000 on a 50-year-old house, for instance, almost all the value is in the land, he says, and you’re buying the excavation, foundation, and framing in 1960s dollars.
“We have a lot of people come to us and say, I talked to a builder and he told me to rip it down. That’s the mentality of the trades,” Brown says. “The general perception is that you have to take the house down. We’re showing that you don’t.” Working with an integrated design/build business model, the firm’s gut renovations clock in at $125 to $150 per square foot, compared with $250 to $300 per square foot for its new homes.
Some houses are easier to renovate than others. “Two parties, plus housebrand, come to an architecture project: one is the client and what they want, the other is the house and what it wants,” Brown says. “You can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but it’s expensive if you don’t start with something halfway there.”
He helps clients evaluate the raw ingredients from a size, structural, and layout perspective: Is the house oriented to take advantage of views, breezes, and the sun’s angles? If an outdoor connection is desired, where is the kitchen? And are there bedrooms along the back of house that will have to be removed? “If the task is to make dessert, there’s no point in starting with meat and potatoes,” he says.
Size is the biggest issue affecting economic efficiency. The footprint is discounted because of its age, and as soon as you expand it you’re paying a premium—essentially building another house, even if it’s just 200 square feet, Brown explains. “That’s the strength of having an architect participate in the purchase,” he adds. “The design process starts when we go out the door to look for a property.”
— c.w.
Other clients cling to shreds of familiarity, making the decision easy. One couple Jameson worked with spent $1.5 million reworking the awkward interior of a developer McMansion. Although they could have built a one-of-a-kind home for the same cost, the owners were attached to the place they’d inhabited for 20-some years. “All of a sudden the soul of the house would have been different,” Jameson says. “Some houses fight like crazy the idea of being renovated; others are very welcoming to it. Houses have their own voices.”
Boston architect Jeremiah Eck, FAIA, has similar feelings in regard to houses. “There’s a kind of spirituality to a house that remains if you save it,” he says. “On occasion, we’ve done heart surgery on houses. I think when you’re done it feels better, like you’ve respected the historic nature of the place.”
Beyond that sixth sense, the world is looking at value in a new way, Eck says. People are focusing harder on what they have. And if money was the driving force in the old economy, it’s also the driving force in the new one. “In the old days there was more leeway about how you approach this,” says Eck, founding principal of Eck | MacNeely Architects. “You can’t get away with it anymore; clients are laser-focused on this stuff.”
But, in his view, a house has to be worth saving. That means stoutly built, and with good siting, massing, proportion, and detailing. Nineteenth- and early 20th-century houses often fulfill those requirements, Eck notes, but all bets are off on more recent structures. “In about 20 years we’ll have a huge stock of houses that will require forensic architecture” when it’s time to remodel. “We’ll be fixing things rather than starting with a unique slate.”
cut and paste
Austin, Texas, already faces this dilemma. It’s a city that never attracted much money, and even architecture with provenance tends to be thinly built. David Webber, AIA, principal of Austin-based Webber + Studio Architects, found himself fighting on the wrong side of the issue a few years ago when a bungalow he was trying to save from demolition turned out to have single-walled construction. “There were no studs, so if you removed the wood siding the house would fall down,” Webber says. The owners subsequently tore down the house, and a local architect designed a new one on the lot. “The house that replaced it will have more historic value in the long run,” he says.
In a complicated endeavor, every now and then a clean solution presents itself. When Webber designed a large addition to a house a few years ago, the contractor counseled that it would be cheaper to tear down and rebuild. Webber disagreed. The issue was neatly resolved, however, when the house was sold and moved off the lot, clearing the way to build his design as a new house. The clients were thrilled to avoid dealing with the problems of adding to an old house, Webber says, or the guilt of throwing it away.
That house did end up costing more to build new than to enlarge. Contractors often aren’t studying the details early enough in the process to give clients accurate information, according to Webber, and they’re focused on the easiest way to get the job done. “With the foundation of an average house costing around $40,000 and the framing $60,000, it’s rare that it makes sense to start over completely,” he says. “Even if the construction is poor, you can use the foundation.”
Milwaukee-based Johnsen Schmaling Architects saved roughly 25 percent of construction costs by taking that approach to a 1970s bilevel tract house a few years ago. The owners didn’t need more space, just more light, storage, and outdoor connections. Principals Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, and Brian Johnsen, AIA, uncluttered the floor plan, added window walls, inserted two cantilevered storage volumes, and popped up the roof with a dramatic clerestory, all while using its boxy footprint, plumbing core, and main perimeter walls.