Houzz

Houzz Tour: Midcentury Beach House Opens Up to the Outdoors

By Jennifer Christgau-Aquino

An update honors a modern Seattle home’s 1950s roots while making it a better entertaining space.

Paul Huggett and Ron Gagliardo didn’t plan to change a thing about their midcentury modern find two blocks from the beach in Seattle. But after three years, things started falling apart in the 1951 home, and they were forced to reconsider. They saw an opportunity to capitalize on the existing open floor plan to create an indoor-outdoor entertaining space.

Midcentury modern architecture is rare in Huggett’s hometown of Atlanta, so when he moved to the West Coast he seized the opportunity to buy a house that embodied the 1950s.

“I didn’t think we were going to renovate the house at all. We loved the character it had,” Huggett says. But then the kitchen cabinets, slathered in several layers of paint, started falling apart.

Their contractor, Joey Fentress, had experience with midcentury modern homes, had a lot of great ideas and was onboard with keeping the home’s original layout intact.

“We love to entertain, living so close to the beach. We wanted to open up the windows so you had a big entrance into the house,” Huggett says. Proform Builds

Because they didn’t want to change the window configuration, their options were limited. Huggett found a Seattle manufacturer that designs doors on pivots. He asked the company to create a giant window that would rotate just like a door but didn’t require the same framing.

The result is a giant window with a pivot that allows it to rotate open, but when the window is closed, it maintains the original configuration.