The brief
A downtown Sacramento Craftsman with its original character still intact underneath decades of wear. The owners wanted a house that lived like a new build without erasing what made it worth saving: the box-beam ceilings, the built-in dining hutch, the brick fireplace, the wide trim.
The build
The house had good bones and bad everything else. The decision that shaped the whole project was made in the first walkthrough: what stays, and what goes.
What stayed was the character work: the box-beam ceiling in the dining room, the built-in hutch with its leaded glass, the brick fireplace, the window seat, and the wide stained casing that runs through the public rooms. All of it was refinished in place. Stripping and refinishing original millwork is slower than replacing it and the finished result is the reason the house still reads as a Craftsman.
What went was everything behind the walls and everything in the wet rooms. The kitchen was gutted and vaulted to the roofline, which gave the room height the original plan never had, then opened to the dining room. The junction between the two ceilings is the detail the whole floor plan turns on: a vaulted white kitchen meeting an original dark box-beam dining room without either one looking wrong. Both bathrooms are new from the studs.
Trim was the discipline. New openings, new doors and new casing were cut to the original profile so that a visitor cannot pick out which openings are 1920s and which are ours. Where new windows were needed, they were sized and placed to match the rhythm of the originals rather than to suit the new interior layout.
Outside, the massing was left alone. The work was paint, siding repair, a new entry stair and rail, and a full landscape reset front and back with drought-appropriate planting, concrete banding and a new rear deck.
The result
The original millwork, coffered ceilings, built-in hutch and fireplace were retained and refinished in place. Everything behind them is new: kitchen, both bathrooms, systems, finishes. The house reads as a Craftsman, not as a remodel of one.
