Renovation opens up and lightens up a standard ranch

Real Estate
Cortland Standard, Thursday, October 30, 2014 — 3A
Renovation opens up and lightens up a standard ranch
the walls a soft beige.
For Sue, lightening up the
house was essential.
“You want to have as much
light as you can in a house,” she
said, “because sometimes the
winters are so dreary here.”
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into the exterior brick to add windows in the bedroom, he vaulted
the ceiling, turned an adjacent
bedroom into a walk-in closet
and made the master bath more
spacious. The Foxes further
lightened the mood by painting
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oramic view of the yard.
The master bedroom underwent a bigger change. The old
room was cave-like, with small
windows high on the wall and
dark chocolate-brown walls.
Though Scro didn’t want to cut
Chris Pedota/The Record/MCT
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Wonderful home set within a golf
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McGRAW
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Fabulous Colonial on approx.
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ing the original color, feeling it
was more true to the home’s vintage and the Frank Lloyd Wright
influence they were going for.
“If you change the brick, it
changes the personality of the
house,” Sue Fox said.
One of the biggest challenges
was updating the circular kitchen, the most unusual element of
the house.
“When they approached me
with this, I didn’t know if I could
do it,” said kitchen designer Kerrie Hubener.
“You took it as a challenge,”
Les Fox said.
In the end, Hubener used
straight lines in a way that suggest circles. For example, the
“round” island is really an octagon, topped with a circular countertop. A semicircle of cabinets
radiates around the island, and
a curved window offers a pan-
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more to get a commercial-grade
frame, the kind of thing you’d
see in an auto showroom. They
painted the interiors mostly in
soothing shades of white and
gray, with the occasional punch
of color — deep turquoise in a
guest bedroom, orange in the
stairwell and their daughter’s
lower-level music room. In the
finished basement, the wall of
an exercise room is covered in a
funky wallpaper, a rhythmic row
of stylized flowers in colors that
include 1970s tones of orange
and avocado green.
“The Partridge Family would
really like this house,” Sue Fox
joked.
Outside, color was a point of
controversy. The architect recommended painting the original
yellow-tan brick exterior.
“As an office, we were pretty
adamant: Let’s go whitewash or
gray,” Scro said.
But the Foxes insisted on keep-
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$259,900
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From left, architect Michael Scro, Andy Russell, the son of
the previous home owner, and Sue and Les Fox pose for
a portrait in Aug. 2013. Les and Sue Fox plan on renovating and modernizing this house they purchased that was
designed and decorated in the 1970s.
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By Kathleen Lynn
The Record
(Hackensack, N.J.)
(MCT)
HACKENSACK, N.J. —
There’s something different
about this 40-year-old ranch on a
winding, leafy street in Wyckoff,
N.J. — but you can only fully see
it once you step inside.
Instead of the low ceilings and
tight spaces of the typical ranch,
this house has an open plan and
15-foot ceilings with high windows that allow the light to pour
in.
The home’s new look is the result of a yearlong renovation that
— like so many rehabs — included some scary surprises and
higher-than-expected costs.
With all that, owners Les and
Sue Fox say they reached their
goal of modernizing the house
while preserving its midcentury
pedigree, including an offbeat,
round kitchen.
“We’re very happy,” said Sue
Fox. “As the project kept going,
we said, ‘We love modern.’”
The key to lightening up the
interior was raising the roof and
adding rows of clerestory windows, though from the street, the
house doesn’t look much taller,
because the extra half-story is
painted a charcoal gray that
seems to recede.
Architect Michael Scro of Z+
Architects in Allendale, N.J.,
said that he and the Foxes shared
the same vision of “open space,
vaulted ceilings and maximum
natural light.”
Even the son of the original
homeowners likes the result.
“The biggest thing is how
much they’ve added open space
and light to a house that didn’t
have much,” said Andy Russell,
who grew up in the house and
now lives out of state.
Russell’s parents had the
house custom-built in 1971. His
mother, an artist, had a vision for
the home that included creative
touches like fabric on the walls
and the round kitchen.
“It’s nice to see a modernized version of what I grew up
in in the 1970s,” Russell said.
“It would have been easier for
someone to just knock down the
house.”
The Foxes paid $770,000 for
the house in August 2013, a year
after Russell’s mother died. They
had hoped to spend no more
than $400,000 on the renovation, but went over that budget,
though they won’t say by how
much. They had to replace all
the systems — plumbing, electrical, heating and air conditioning. Mostly, they say, they spent
more because, as the renovation
moved forward, they decided
they wanted more.
“There was nothing we paid
too much for; we just did a lot of
things,” said Les.
There were also some costly
surprises along the way. For example, the in-ground pool needed $35,000 worth of renovations,
instead of the $10,000 to $15,000
they had expected.
Another unexpected expense
was $17,000 worth of steel beams
to support the higher roof.
Then there were the floors. The
original oak floors were in decent
shape, and the Foxes had hoped
to salvage them. But when they
tore off the roof, rain poured in
and ruined the floors.
That had an upside, however.
Since they had to put in new
floors, Sue Fox saw an opportunity to add radiant heating under
the floors, which is more expensive than baseboards, but, she
thinks, more comfortable.
Like the house, Les and Sue
Fox have their own colorful history. They’re art dealers, as well
as home builders and renovators,
who wrote and self-published a
best-selling guide to Beanie Babies at the crest of the Beanie
craze in the late 1990s.
They’ve built or renovated
20 houses since 1975, half to sell,
half to live in. They plan to move
into the ranch within a month, after selling their current home —
a 7,000-square-foot Craftsmaninfluenced house that’s just up
the block.
They hope the ranch, which
has 3,000 square feet on the main
level and 1,500 square feet on the
lower level, will show potential
clients what they can offer as
builders and renovators.
The main living space includes
a two-sided fireplace between the
living room and the eat-in kitchen, flanked by a counter that’s
perfect for Scrabble, one of the
couple’s passions. The original
dark, solid double front doors
have been replaced by glasspaneled doors, which allow more
light in.
The Foxes added a sunroom to
the back of the house, spending
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