Midcentury Made Modern: Tarrytown Home Gets a Makeover with Playful Colors
The owners of this West Austin home are preserving the past while innovating for the present
While many argue that things were just made better back in the day, sometimes a vintage design can be better in theory than in practice. The owners of this West Austin home, nicknamed the Tarrytown Color Pop, loved the mid-century look of the 1952 house, but found they needed to make some changes in order to better accommodate their lives. Among those changes, they wanted a more spacious, updated interior layout, different color schemes and improvement of the quality of sound and air transmission from exterior to interior.
“Our clients loved the home and lot they purchased and the neighborhood they purchased in, but the layout of the home itself did not work for their family-centric lifestyle,” explains Design Manager and Senior Project Designer Sara Hadden of CG&S, a family-run construction business started in 1957 and rebranded as CG&S Design-Build in 2018.
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Hadden began the renovation of the exterior of the home from an energy-efficient point of view, replacing all the windows with energy-efficient, double-pane glass, and reinsulating the entire exterior envelope, including the roof.
On the interior, Hadden and her team opened up the kitchen to the living room, dining room and family room, creating an open-plan public zone. The house now features floor-to-ceiling windows offering a continuous view out to the backyard and new outdoor living area by the pool. Separate bedrooms make for quiet zones for sleeping and working from home, and there are also designated areas for crafting and gaming, plus a mudroom, plenty of storage space and a laundry room adjacent to the bedrooms.
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And, true to its nickname, there are playful colors incorporated all throughout the house. In the kitchen, canary yellow and robin’s egg blue accent walls pop against pure white hex tile, while each bathroom features a unique and vibrant wallpaper print. On the exterior, more muted colors, new encaustic cement tile and a wide solid-wood door give the entire residence a facelift while maintaining its midcentury charm.
“Our clients love their home, and appreciate that they can live and work in the home in the way they had envisioned,” says Hadden.