Andrew Sidford Architects opens the door to a whole new vision.
The kitchen inside the renovated home.

Architects are hired because of their obvious expertise. The team at Andrew Sidford Architects (asidfordarchitects.com) comes to the table equipped with an additional set of skills—the ability to show you a vision you cannot yet see for yourself.

When the owners of this 1952 shed roof split-level home signed on with Sidford, they wanted to replace a rotting one-story bedroom wing with the intention of renovating the rest of the house at a later date. Architect Andrew Sidford, as he is wont to do, turned the meeting into a discussion of the client’s overall desires. “We always begin with a discovery slash interrogation, which asks, what do you want and why? That’s so important for us. When we sat down and talked with these clients about what is most important, they said in a perfect world they would like the bedroom to look out over the backyard,” says Sidford. He learned that they felt the home was claustrophobic and that, ideally, they would love to live on a nature preserve.

On a 2.5-acre site, the house was situated near the road, with the rotting wing projecting closest to traffic. Andrew traced a simple axis shift and reoriented the clients’ focus to the rear yard. “We said, based on what you said, this option puts your primary bedroom in the backyard and makes it feel more like the nature preserve that you described,” he says.

the home before Andrew Sidford Architects worked their magic.

The shift evolved into a glass parallelogram bisecting the center of the existing house. The addition adds new rooms that complement the original house. The rest of the home was renovated, and qualities worth saving in the original rooms were preserved. Sidford and his team also created the interior design and did the cabinetry, casework, bathrooms, fireplace and lighting. Although not a large property, it now feels spacious. “We didn’t kill the original house, just augmented it,’ says Sidford. They also strengthened the connection between the inside and outside space so the homeowners feel like they’re sleeping and eating outdoors. The house is equally modern and warm, expansive and intimate.

The new design actually reduced the home’s footprint, a boon for a site heavily limited by conservation restrictions, and brought abundant daylight into all of the primary living spaces. Where there was once a low, single-story rectangular wing, there is now a glass dining room cantilevered over gardens. At the opposite end of the glass parallelogram, the primary bedroom protrudes out over the gardens facing the rear yard and the seemingly endless woods. The new design eliminated the need for a future renovation. “This was a holistic approach to listening to the client and showing them options they hadn’t considered. We started with how little we could change this house and showed them what they asked for. Then we said, if you listen to everything you described, you should consider this second option. We recognize that although they would’ve spent less on the initial proposed addition, it would have been a much lower return on that investment,” says Sidford.

The new dining room cantilevered into the front yard.

This project is one that Sidford regularly shares with new clients because he feels it best shows his process. The clients never could have imagined their home as it now exists. “Our strength is that we push our clients to new places, we open doors to new perspectives, but we don’t turn them into people they aren’t. We get them to recognize the vision comes from within them. That’s the whole point of hiring an architect, right?”