The clients came to us with a home they wanted to renovate quickly and inexpensively. When we went to visit the site we found a spec house that had been added onto and modified in a highly unusual way by its previous owners, with disconnected balconies glued onto two facades and details resolved in an ad-hoc manner.

The planning of the home on the interior was very poorly executed by the builders, and left odd unusable spaces scattered throughout the house, including a stairway that protruded into a bedroom on the ground floor and the living room on the second floor.

Our job was to bring some logic to the plan and to simplify the exterior as best as possible. Lacking the budget to make large changes, we focused instead on surfaces - creating a wooden skin that wrapped around the exterior and a faceted skin that wrapped around the central stairwell. The former worked as a handrail and sunshade, while the latter contained an updated mechanical system and a simple set of shelves.