Avondale House
Haddonfield, NJ
Space planning is about listening deeply to how a family wants to move through every moment of the day, and understanding it so well that you can give the perfect shape to the entire imagined experience. It’s so much more than a floor plan. It’s experiential.
Here, the entry flows into the living room (which visually rolls right out into the wide open landscape), living glides into the dining and kitchen, kitchen into family room, family into the stair. Private bedrooms extend down the hall.
Raising the ceilings was essential, because Julie and Daniel have a huge extended family who are very tall! To accentuate the soaring cathedral ceiling, we added skylights to frame the sky; expanded windows to frame the trees. Sunlight now comes in from every direction, dancing from wall to wall through the day.
Renovation is harder than new construction because you are wrestling with existing conditions. Expanding usable space without expanding the footprint makes it even harder. But sometimes the right choice is the hardest one. Rather than building up or out, we built down, grounding the home into the earth, preserving the beautiful landscape and lowering construction costs. Doing the most with what you have is good design, good stewardship, and good budget management.
Arriving at the lower level (which we refused to call a “basement” from day one!) you are greeted by a generous view to the backyard. We tucked a bar under the stair, and a banquette under mechanical systems, turning every piece of building infrastructure into aesthetic exploration. An in-law suite for Julie’s parents, office, guest room, laundry, storage, mechanical room and multiple new bathrooms are woven into the space, like pieces in a puzzle. Not one inch is wasted.
