Ivy Street
It has been an honor to work on a house that is down the street from our Fisher ARCHitecture home/office! As always, our inclination when we first visited Ivy Street was to:
“Let old be old and new be new. We should certainly restore worthy old buildings because our shared history is worth preserving. It is what binds our culture together. And these buildings are often beautiful, with spatial configurations and decorations that cannot easily be duplicated.”
Read More >That was an excerpt from a speech that Bea and I gave in 2019 at the American Institute of Architects National Conference on Architecture in Las Vegas. The existing Ivy Street exterior facade WAS beautiful in its way, so preserving it was a worthy goal.
We installed a new awning and front door outdoors. That was it. Our thought was that the project would be like an old car with a new engine. You wouldn’t know about the improvements from looking at the home from the outside. In fact, you wouldn’t even know we had worked on the building!
However, we had no such respect for the home interior, which was was in very poor shape. The old trim was falling to pieces and the floors were beyond repair. We agreed with the owners’ opinion that a total renovation was the way to go.
We always like to work with a negotiated bid process on projects like this, bringing the contractor to the table up front before the architect creates a complete set of drawings. The contractor, the owner, and the architect all work together to determine the project scope and price based on the owner’s budget. We were fortunate to work with skilled contractor, Bruce Corna, and his team from Bruce Construction. They did a great job implementing the owners’ vision.
For more interior renovations designed by Fisher Architects, check out the Ormond Renovation and Family Dynamics.
