A Modern Goat Ranch? (continued)
About to become parents, a pair of Portland, Oregon, restaurateurs fell for a 1960s ranch house on a goat farm just minutes from downtown
The foyer, dining room and living area of the house make one large open space, and light spreads throughout. Sheer white drapes covering sliding-glass patio doors actually seem to brighten the room when closed. "Bruce and Joe have created a wonderful family place," their friend Tharp says, "but it feels like a lot of cocktail parties happened there back in the '70s. It would have been a flirtatious little place, perfect for a New Year's Eve party."
Both the master bedroom and its adjacent study highlight the homeowners' shared love of Danish modern furniture. "You sense the woodcraft," Carey says. "It's modern, but it's not mechanical."
The master bedroom of the original plan was accessible through a doorway beside the main entrance of the house. Carey rerouted the master suite access through the adjacent study and up two small stairs (the whole house slopes downward from north to south -- hence also the sunken living room). This put added focus on the bookshelf-lined study, Carey's favorite room in the house. It has "the full vault height, with high, soaring ceilings," he explains. "That creates drama in an intimate room."
Moving the entry to the master suite gave Carey enough room to create a walk-in closet and a resort-style bathroom. He enclosed the toilet in its own mini-room and created an open shower by removing the wall that once separated it from the sink. New sconces, a wraparound mirror and a buttery-toned Crema Marfil countertop give the bathroom an entirely different feel from the rest of the house. "I made it more private," Carey says, "so you can walk from the shower to the sink to the closet and not have to be thinking about who's at the front door.
"My friends tease me about it," Carey adds, "but all this work is not about my love of remodeling. It's about the best way to make a house that accommodates family and friends."
What the Pros Know
The original house had a midcentury provenance but a somewhat kitschy neo-Spanish style that homeowner Bruce Carey wanted to soften yet maintain -- which made the renovation process an exercise in balancing the vintage with the modern. Carey squared off old-fashioned arched windows, although he retained the lodgelike wood paneling on the walls and ceiling. "My biggest challenge," he says, "was the way the paneling absorbed light, but I love the wheat-brown color that comes out in the hemlock." To play against the heavily wooded interior, Carey used IKEA cabinets in a pale eggshell white in the kitchen, dining room and master bathroom and kept a large skylight between the kitchen and the family room. Furnishings throughout, which echo the light/dark theme, run the gamut from the anonymous to the iconic, the antique to the contemporary, eBay to Eames, giving the whole a timelessness that doesn't apologize for the home's specific architectural identity.
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