When after the pandemic a family moved into a beautiful two-family home in Portland’s Deering neighborhood—built in the 1860s—they quickly found that it needed some love.
As they started to imagine the long life of their property within a densely populated community, they wanted to renovate with the utmost care. They found the ideal collaborators in Portland’s Juniper Design + Build, a majority woman-owned residential design-build company specializing in high-performance, low-carbon construction.
“They had moved here from out of state in the Covid-19 transition that a lot of people were making,” says Rachel Conly, Juniper’s co-founder and design director. “They recognized both that they wanted to redo the home but also that housing is needed in Portland, so they didn’t want to remove housing stock.”
Instead of remodeling the entire property for their own use, the homeowners enlisted Juniper to touch up the apartment on the first floor and remodel the second floor and attic into their own living space.
“We made it a true third story, so that the owners could live in this duplex and make that their home, but make it large enough for their family, comfortable, and energy efficient.”
Rachel’s team removed the attic to build a proper third floor that provided generous living space and met building code for head clearances. To integrate the redesign into Deering’s duplex vocabulary, they maintained the gable attic structure from the exterior while raising the roof line and using thoughtful roof overhangs.
For the homeowners, carefully situating the home within the local landscape mattered at every level—from providing housing stock to mitigating the home’s carbon footprint. Juniper’s Passive House-inspired model seemed to be the perfect fit.
“One of the ideas is that you are making the envelope of the building robust enough and the home airtight enough that you’re reducing the need to rely on fossil fuels and utility systems,” Rachel says.
The home’s high-performance double stud walls are insulated with dense pack cellulose. Windows are triple-pane glazed for higher performance and increased energy efficiency. Juniper favors wood- and fiber-based materials that don’t off-gas, as well as naturally resistant materials to promote durability, comfort, and energy savings.
“That’s what high performance means for us, and that’s what’s inspired by Passive House principles,” Rachel says. “High performance, durability, and sustainability married with beauty—that’s how we operate. That’s the crux of the value that I think we bring to every project.”
The Passive House envelope provided ample opportunities for ingenuous aesthetic chances. In renovating this historic home, they uplifted dialogue between old and new.
“The name we gave the project, Vintage Vibe, really encapsulates what we were going for,” Rachel says. “They wanted to not disrupt the neighborhood or the home, so that it still has that period quality of the original, which is beautiful, but also has a flare of modern attitude. It ends up being this playful hybrid.”
The expanded third floor leans modern, with contemporary windows, clean lines, and detailing, whereas they maintained, and even rebuilt, the traditional detailing on the first and second stories.
“The joy of the project was in that question, ‘How do you mix these two vocabularies into an aesthetic that is going to work?’”
The home’s eras graduate as you ascend. An older staircase leads to the second floor with its traditional millwork, and the third story staircase creates a natural transition zone into the addition.
“That vocabulary shifts,” Rachel says. “Not only is it in the detailing, but light and air start opening up from that stairwell into the new spaces. They not only gained more space, but there’s more light traveling through the whole home.”
One of the homeowners fell in love with the interior design process too. Their embrace of color gives the home a charming, urban air—a brushed rose in the bedroom, jade in the bathroom that pops against the black and white tile floor. She let her children pick out paint for their rooms, and the home became distinctly customized to who they are as a family. One of their daughters selected a darker blue and pinned origami to the walls. The husband plays music, and they carved out a crafty corner on the third floor for him to riff.
In the second-floor kitchen, they truly flaunted the home’s “vintage vibe.” Contemporary cabinetry and countertops cut crisp lines through the space, and the walls are decluttered with minimal shelving. The homeowner purchased a beautiful, secondhand hutch for storage. The team salvaged wood from the demolition process and made a peninsula seating area, ringed by vintage stools.
“Paying attention to those opportunities when you can add those elements intrinsically makes it feel like it belongs,” Rachel says, “even though there’s this other context of a more contemporary space that’s right there too.” ▪
