The Brookline Mid-century Modern House Geometry Lessons

A simple gray box built in the 1950s transforms into a stunning, spacious home for a young family, thanks to a pair of six-sided additions and plenty of clean-lined finishes inside

- Jill Connors

From their first walk-through of the small, boxy 1950s house in Brookline, Massachusetts, Dr. Sunil Ghelani and Dr. Neha Kwatra envisioned it transformed. Once filming wrapped on the renovated mid-century modern house—a subject of This Old House’s 40th-anniversary television season—and party guests filled the warmly lit and comfortably furnished rooms, the split-level, open interior, with its soaring ceilings, cool-gray floors, and expansive windows, didn’t disappoint. “It’s what we had imagined our dream house would be,” says Neha.

Achieving each of those signature design elements presented special challenges, however. The open floor plan meant nowhere to run ductwork; the porcelain-tile floors were a compromise, as the concrete the homeowners wanted would have meant additional work to beef up the floor structure; the 14-foot ceilings required maneuvering 25-foot-long steel I-beams and engineered lumber beams into place; and the large windows and folding glass doors entailed their own complex installation.

“The original house was really only four walls and a shed roof,” says This Old House general contractor Tom Silva of the simple structure that the TOH team encountered. “There wasn’t much worth saving.” Once into the project, hidden problems emerged: The original foundation had no footings; the main sewer line was compromised by tree roots; and a number of materials used in closets and bedrooms contained asbestos—to name a few.