40 | Oregon Home Sometimes the best mode of action when redoing a home is to listen to the house. That certainly held true for a family moving to Portland from Germany, who wanted to apply a more modern sensibility to a home on Portland’s Laurelhurst Park but was struggling with its overall layout. “This is such a special house,” says designer Ryan Harkrider of Wise Design, who helped on the project. “The more we talked to the clients about this house, the more attached they got to the traditional style of architecture.” The couple turned to Harkrider and design principal Annie Wise to achieve a balance between the choppy charm of an authentic 1918 Colonial and the serene flow of an open living space. Making these changes allowed the couple to strike a balance between their love of a midcentury aesthetic and modernism and their affection for the particularities of the home’s Colonial architecture. The couple hadn’t originally planned to completely redo the home. But during an initial renovation they discovered extensive fire damage on the second floor, so they became open to a larger project. The home’s transitions between rooms became vital. Wise Design was able to connect past to the present in the passageways between rooms, through larger structural changes between the indoor and outdoor living spaces, and in the aesthetic conversation between BEFORE
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