Historic Preservation Award

What to do with a strange second floor deck that is falling off your house? Make it into a perfect and serene ensuite bath! When these homeowners called us for help, we decided to take the deck down before it fell, and with the design vision of Oak Park architect Debra McQueen, we started work on a new second floor addition. There were many challenges—how to get plumbing up from the basement without destroying the integrity of the beautifully preserved and renovated first floor, how to make the addition seamless, and how to make the space exactly what the homeowner was looking for--a simple but beautiful retreat.

Here is how the house looked before the addition.

We started with the exterior, adding beautiful period-appropriate art glass windows, then staining the new bricks to match the original bricks exactly, and adding a ribbon of limestone custom cut to miter into the existing limestone detail.

On the inside, we added spray foam insulation to make sure that the bath space was always toasty and comfortable, classic tiles, tub and vanity chosen by the owner, and notice the marble window trims--half of the windows are in the shower and the other half out, so we had to trim them in a way that could stand up to water but look great outside the shower as well.

We were pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from the Village of Oak Park sometime after completion telling us they had chosen the project for an Historical Preservation Award!  Check out the article written in the Wednesday Journal about the house.