The Deep Dive: An Artful Renovation

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.

When Dale and Lois Schreiber were envisioning their move from New York City to South Orange, New Jersey, to be closer to two of their four grown children, they pictured settling into a townhome within walking distance of their family. While the 1969 home that the Schreibers ultimately purchased did satisfy the couple’s proximity requirements, it did not promise to be the easy move-in experience that one expects from a townhome. "’Not a lot had been done to the house in the last 50 years and, at our age, we didn’t want to do another project,’" their son-in-law Felix Aarts recalls being told by the Schreibers about the home featured in our January/February issue. (The home was originally designed by Marcel Breuer’s business partner Herbert Beckhard.)

The Schreibers made the leap all the same, in part because they deputized Aarts to oversee the house’s renovation. Aarts knew the role involved client representation, project management, and the wearing of many other hats, and one of his first orders of business was matchmaking his in-laws to an architect.

Knowing that fellow South Orange resident and architect Cristina Ioana Graff had considered buying the Beckhard-designed home for her own family, Aarts invited Graff to an in-person introduction. "When they met Cristina and walked through the house together and heard her ideas, I think there was an immediate connection," Aarts says of the homeowners. "They saw that Cristina understood what they wanted to keep and what needed to be updated." 

Graff set to work on reconfiguring Beckhard’s binuclear, single-level plan into an open layout for aging in place with equal quickness. "We thought about wide, accessible spaces, but to accomplish them in a subtle way that was natural to the house," Graff explains of her brief. "We did not want the house dictating, ‘This is where you sleep and this is where you butter your bread.’ We were most interested in fluidity, in lives that were not compartmentalized."

Meanwhile, Aarts put on another of his hats, as the project’s art consultant. The Schreibers had tended to a collection of art and design that had traveled with them to several homes, sometimes awkwardly, and Aarts began to plan how the renovation could accommodate these beloved pieces with grace. "It was figuring out how to create exciting walls," Aarts says of the task, noting that distinct artworks like an abstract landscape and a nude portrait could share the same spotlight if they both suited the room.

Graff stayed in regular touch as Aarts considered potential locations. "As Cristina was moving through her design process, she would ask for photos of artworks and furniture, which she placed in her renderings so the space would feel familiar to Dale and Lois," he recounts, adding, "I would say Cristina designed certain spaces for certain pieces of furniture and art, but she also used pieces to fit her design. So, it went both ways."

The project also sparked some new collecting on the Schreibers’ part. In one example, "my mother-in-law asked whether I still had pieces that I made in art school in Norway, which were rolled up in my garage," says Aarts. In another, Aarts ordered a custom family room rug from Emily Forgot: the London-based designer had originally conceived the flooring design as a response to a Marcel Breuer–designed stair she had scrutinized inside the Dutch department store de Bijenkorf. 

Alongside Graff, the family members even did their additional collecting from inside the residence. After Lois remarked that the figure inscribed on a light switch cover in the powder room reminded of her mother, that mounting plate found a spot in the dressing room. Tile as well as interior wood was salvaged and adapted to other surfaces—Aarts notes that those planks, for instance, "now clad one of the walls in a section of the basement that had been designed but not originally built, and they lend the room a genuineness like it had always been there." 

Authentic is how Aarts describes the overall melding of architecture, art, and design. "Everything came together like a puzzle," he says, "and while everything was considered in response to the midcentury aesthetic, the interior doesn’t feel like a time capsule." Graff happily concurs: "I actually think the collection is more appreciated now than ever before. When I see Felix’s daughter run among the art and furniture, I’m reminded that these are pieces meant to be lived with and shared across generations. It’s remarkable to see these treasures made accessible to everybody."

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