Most renovation stories begin with a set of plans. This one begins with a set of plans that had to be thrown out.
By the time the homeowners found their way to us, they had already spent more than a year working with another architect on a kitchen addition and a larger renovation of their home in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, a river town in Bucks County just across the Delaware from Trenton. The drawings represented a year of hopes and decisions. They also could not be built. The design tried to satisfy every wish on the list at once, and in doing so it lost sight of both the character of the existing house and the budget the family actually had to work with. When they learned that the plans they had invested so much time in were not realistic to construct, the family was ready to give up on the whole idea.
A Design That Could Be Built
We sat down with the family and with the builder we have partnered with on previous award winning projects, and we asked a different question than the one the earlier design had been trying to answer. Instead of how to fit everything the family wanted into one design, we asked what the house and the budget could actually support, and how to phase the rest for later. We proposed assembling a small team to redesign the project from that starting point, rather than patch the plans that already existed.
That reset made the difference. As the homeowners later put it, “the end result exceeded our expectations.” The new plan kept every goal that mattered most to the family and let go of the ones that did not fit the budget, which turned out to be exactly what the project needed to move forward at all.
A Site With a Mind of Its Own
Even with a workable design in hand, the ground had its own opinion. We broke ground in early spring 2011, and it rained for three straight days. Because the property sits close to the Delaware River, on land that was once part of the riverbed itself, the soil beneath the yard turned out to be little more than silt and sediment. Between the rain and the ground conditions, excavation equipment sat stuck in the back yard for weeks.
Getting materials to the work itself became its own project. The construction entrance absorbed five tri-axle truckloads of stone before it could support regular traffic, and even then equipment kept getting stuck. The fix was to bridge the soft ground with steel plates, each eight feet by ten, to give trucks and equipment a stable path to the site. The delays cost roughly three weeks off the schedule, and the crew still finished the project on time.
From a Closed-Off House to an Open One
The house the homeowners lived in had the layout of its era: a long, narrow hallway, a foyer so dark and cramped it barely registered as an entry, and a family room ringed with doorways that created bottlenecks rather than flow. The back hall did double duty as a mudroom and a laundry room, with baskets and coats crowding the path to the door. None of it worked for how the family actually used the house.
The redesigned floor plan addressed all of it at once. Relocating a living room wall let us enlarge the foyer, and tall wainscot panels, new transom windows, and a lighter color palette brought natural and reflected light down the hall for the first time. In the family room, rather than removing walls and leaving the space feeling exposed, we added bookcases, columns, and a beam that create a visual separation between rooms while keeping the sightlines open, and we enlarged the opening into the dining room so the spaces read as connected rather than boxed in.
A Kitchen the Family Could Actually Use
The existing kitchen was dark, undersized, and dated, tucked behind a doorway with barely enough counter space to cook a family meal. The new kitchen replaces it with a furniture-style island topped in thick granite, a six-burner range, paneled refrigerator and freezer columns, a farmhouse sink, and shaker-style cabinetry that suits the age of the house rather than fighting it. A tray ceiling and a run of pendant lights mark the space without closing it off from the bright breakfast nook next door, where a farmhouse table now looks straight out to the yard.
The old back hall, the one that used to hold the laundry basket and the coats, is gone. In its place is a proper mudroom, reached through an enlarged, transom-topped opening that ties the whole rear of the house together.
The finished project went on to take first place in the National Association of the Remodeling Industry’s Contractor of the Year (CotY) awards in 2012. That recognition matters to us, but the more useful takeaway for anyone starting a renovation is the one the project makes plainly: a design only works if it can actually be built, on the site you have and the budget you have. Getting that right the first time saves a year of drawings that never leave the table.
If you are working with a design that no longer feels realistic, or have not started drawing yet at all, we would welcome the chance to talk through what is achievable. A complimentary initial consultation is always the place to start.
