Dating Back to 1870, a Sunny Yellow Home in Charlottesville Asks $2.25M

The renovated residence still has its original moldings and windows—plus a contemporary two-story addition.

Location: 1112 Park Street, Charlottesville, Virginia

Price: $2,250,000

Year Built: 1870

Footprint: 5,340 square feet (4 bed, 4 bath)

Lot Size: 1.1 acres

From the Agent: "The owner/architects have taken one of the original stately Charlottesville homes from 1870 and brought the outdoors into the house. Keeping the charm at the front with original moldings and windows, the two-story addition flows seamlessly to the backyard. This newer build has floor-to-ceiling Spanish cedar windows with views of the 1.1-acre manicured lawn. The heart of the house has accordion doors that open completely to a sapele wood deck overlooking the 6.5-acres of green space at Davis Park. The kitchen includes custom cabinetry, a separate bar, and a large pantry. The home also has a concrete pool with a bluestone terrace, and a one-car garage."

The renovated residence still has its original moldings and windows—plus a contemporary two-story addition.

Photo by Beth Monaco

The lush site is home to mature shrubs, historic oak trees, and tulip poplars. 

Photo by Beth Monaco

Photo by Beth Monaco

See the full story on Dwell.com: Dating Back to 1870, a Sunny Yellow Home in Charlottesville Asks $2.25M
Related stories:

• In Gainesville, a Renovated 1920s Home Goes for Bold—and $584K
• This Frank Lloyd Wright–Inspired Home Had Termites So Bad It Was Being Advertised as a $170K Lot
• Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M

In Gainesville, a Renovated 1920s Home Goes for Bold—and $584K

In the city’s historic Duckpond neighborhood, two artist-designers brought Scandinavian maximalism, custom millwork, and whimsical color to a French Eclectic house.

Location: 521 Northeast 6th Street, Gainesville, Florida

Price: $575,000

Year Built: 1920

Renovation Date: 2023

Renovation Designer: Studio Blinky

Footprint: 1,962 square feet (3 beds, 2 baths)

Lot Size: 2 acres

From the Agent: "Built in the early 1900s in Gainesville’s historic Duckpond neighborhood, this home reflects more than a century of change. In its most recent renovation, two artist-designers embraced those layers of history rather than restoring the house to any single period. Original French Eclectic details remain untouched, while Scandinavian maximalism, custom millwork, and bold color add something new. A custom wooden garden arch and blossoming landscaping frame the approach to the house. Inside, an original limestone and marble fireplace anchors the living room, while a bright blue staircase adds a pop of color. On the ground floor, a series of newly added archways connect the living room, screened sun porch, dining room, kitchen, and playroom, echoing the home’s original arched dormers. Throughout, built-ins add storage, display, and bursts of color. A tucked-away room offers flexible space for play, work, or reading. Considered updates—including skim-coated walls, refinished original floors, trimless lighting, and microcement surfaces—add contemporary notes alongside the home’s historic details. The renovated kitchen pairs Reform oak cabinetry with green countertops designed by Müller Van Severen, combining natural materials with a more playful sensibility. Three upstairs bedrooms and a shared bath sit beneath angled ceilings and dormer windows that bring light deep into the home. Built-in bookcases, a yellow stair-landing library, and lighting from Raw Color, HAY, Gubi, and others extend the design language into the home’s more private spaces."

The front walkway is framed by a custom wooden garden arch.

Photo by BlueHour Media Co.

The limestone-and-marble fireplace in the living room is original to the house.

Photo by David George

New archways on the ground floor connect the living room, screened sun porch, dining room, kitchen, and playroom, while nodding to the home’s original arched dormers.

Photo by David George

See the full story on Dwell.com: In Gainesville, a Renovated 1920s Home Goes for Bold—and $584K
Related stories:

• This Frank Lloyd Wright–Inspired Home Had Termites So Bad It Was Being Advertised as a $170K Lot
• Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M
• Color Runs Wild in This $5M Brooklyn Town House

Another Norman Jaffe Gem Gets Bulldozed—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

I.M. Pei's Dallas City Hall is declared an endangered building, the near-collapse of Pfizer’s former New York headquarters reignites safety concerns, and more.

• In May of 2025, Norman Jaffe’s Stern House in East Hampton Village was demolished, adding to a growing list of significant homes by the modernist architect that have met the fate of a bulldozer. Now, the Bliss House in Southampton, New York, has been demolished, too. Here’s how the celebrated example of organic modernism ended up a "pile of rubble" despite years of preservation efforts. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

• At the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown New York, inspectors found buckled structural columns that were "bending like cigarettes," which prompted an emergency evacuation. Records show the building had already racked up numerous safety violations and worker injuries before the near-collapse. (The City Reporter)

• Plans from the 1980s for an unrealized 60-story "Trump Castle" in New York City by Philip Johnson and John Burgee have resurfaced, detailing an extravagant design complete with spires, drawbridges, and even a moat. The drawings foreshadow some of Trump’s grand architectural ambitions today. (The New York Times)

• Dallas City Hall, the brutalist landmark designed by I. M. Pei, has landed on both the World Monuments Fund and Preservation Dallas lists of the nation’s most endangered places. But it might not be enough to save it: Preservation advocates warn that pressure from private developers and hefty rehabilitation costs are putting the building at risk of abandonment, and even demolition. (The Dallas Morning News)

• A recent investigation revealed that a mafia-like network of unlicensed food trucks has taken over stretches of the National Mall in D.C., operating with alleged food safety violations, majorly inflated prices, and aggressive tactics that have driven out many licensed vendors. Authorities say the operation is tied to a group of repeat offenders who use shell companies to stay under the radar. (Washingtonian)

Top photo by Tim Godbold

A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

It gives depth to the ground-floor living space, made brighter by a wall-to-wall skylight and floor-to-ceiling glass doors that open onto a rear courtyard.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Bondi Junction, Sydney, Australia

Architect: Studio Carson Kelly / @studiocarsonkelly

Footprint: 1,023 square feet

Builder: First Grade

Photographer: Dina Grinberg / @dinagrinberg_

From the Architect: "For a year, the principals of Studio Carson Kelly—architect Klaus and creative director Nicholas—lived in the house as they redesigned it, studying its light, its failures, and its latent capacity before submitting a fresh scheme for approval. That period of occupation is embedded in the outcome. The planning reflects a close understanding of how a house of this scale can sustain daily life without expansion—a compression of circulation achieved through spatial logic rather than sacrifice. A dog-legged stair performs double duty as both movement and infrastructure, integrating the laundry within its form and resolving into a compact landing from which each bedroom on the first floor level occupies the full boundary-to-boundary width of the site. Redundant corridors are removed; movement is folded back into the architecture itself.

"The roof became the primary surface for introducing daylight. A series of skylights—including a boundary-to-boundary skylight at the center of the plan—draw light deep into the section, allowing it to move and shift throughout the day in a house that might otherwise read as dark and compressed. Clerestory glazing extends this vertical distribution further.

"Material selection is structured around contrast as a way of giving each zone its own register while maintaining coherence across the whole. A custom elongated brick format carries the exterior language inward, appearing underfoot in the courtyard, rising into built-in seating, and forming the enclosing walls of key interior spaces. Its recurrence across these thresholds dissolves the boundary between inside and out, allowing the courtyard to extend the living zone without additional area. At the lower level, a patchwork terrazzo field operates as a composed surface that catches light and shifts in tone across the day, anchoring the space with a quality closer to permanence than finish.

"The kitchen is conceived as a sequence of interconnected zones. Mirrored joinery defines the primary storage wall, amplifying light and extending sight lines to work against the house's narrow dimension. Intersecting this is a stainless-steel working zone whose reflective quality ties it back to the mirrored elements and maintains a coherent visual language across the space. A floating stone slab, pulled off the perimeter to allow full circulation, operates simultaneously as dining table, island, and social anchor—consolidating functions into a single monolithic object and allowing the kitchen to remain open and flexible across different modes of use.

"The bathrooms shift into a more immersive material register. Stone is handled as an enveloping surface rather than an applied finish, wrapped and varied in scale across mosaic, elongated formats, and larger slabs. Glass brick introduces a softer atmospheric layer in the primary bedroom within the otherwise rectilinear geometry: a circular aperture formed from square units that reads as a moment of visual relief within the ordered framework, filtering light into a diffused glow while obscuring sight lines with depth and texture. The primary ensuite carries this furthest—a generous shower volume set beneath a full skylight that opens directly to sky and tree canopy above."

Photo by Dina Grinberg

Photo by Dina Grinberg

Photo by Dina Grinberg

See the full story on Dwell.com: A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

From the Archive: A Closer Look at Artist Jim Isermann’s Pattern Happy Universe

"Ultimately, I still believe in the pragmatic populist ideal that nothing is beneath being improved by being well designed," the designer—whose work spans tiles, handmade rugs, paintings, and more—told Dwell 20 years ago.

Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the June 2006 issue.

Many contemporary visual artists are mining the reservoirs of design history in their art practice. Museum exhibitions on the conflation of "art" and "design" abound, generating new discourses and practices that blur critical distinctions between the two realms. One of the artists who has been at the vanguard of these concerns is Palm Springs, California-based Jim Isermann.

Over the last 25 years, Isermann has combined the functional and the aesthetic in complex but surprisingly undidactic work that has consistently provoked questions about the status of art and design. Focusing on the fertile exchange of visual information between high art and postwar industrial design, Isermann has created (among other work) wall hangings, handmade woven rugs and tiles, and vacuum-molded wall modules that seem to celebrate—in the boldest sense—idealized and unmediated visual pleasure.

Today, Isermann divides his work between large-scale commissions like a 9,000-pound chandelier for Genentech Hall, in University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay Campus; gallery shows; and new projects, which include the most recent iT House decals and a graphic pattern for fashion designer Trina Turk’s spring line. On the occasion of his recent Deitch Projects show in New York, we thought it was the perfect time to check in with Isermann.

Photos by Darcy Hemley / Fredrik Milsen

Unlike the artists in last year’s Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Design ≠ Art, which featured functional designs by visual artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Rachel Whiteread, your work engages with design on another level. I see your Corvi-Mora modular wall, for example, as a portal to understanding your work. It looks commercially fabricated, but is in fact handmade.

Fabrication of work for gallery shows creates a conundrum for me because it raises all those old questions for viewers as to whether the work is "art" or "design." I work with commercial manufacturers and art fabricators, and I make work by hand, depending on the project. Many artists work with fabricators, but they don’t make art that exists in this no-man’s land between art and design. Yes, at first glance the Corvi-Mora wall looks like it is commercially fabricated, but in fact I spent six months making the 112 modules myself. They are hand-painted and there is a degree of imperfection and difference between them. Like a lot of my practice, the work is not exactly what you initially think it is.

Your work has a very strong effect on its audience. I see it more in the tradition of installation and site-specific art than design, which further complicates what you do.

It’s true that what I do is very open-ended. I design, or I propose, or I make something that functions in a space and has a dual or multiple purpose because it functions as art but does not knock you over the head as being art—or as having an impenetrable concept. It is about a particular quality of experience.

I approach art making, and especially the commissioned work, from a pragmatic point of view. I want to do the best within the given limitations and give something that has a slow, long-term enjoyment that resonates with its site. When you live with something day in and day out, you become attached to it in another way.

Where do you situate yourself on the modernist map?

"Modern" is a word that has many different meanings and is often misused. I used to really be fascinated by work like Verner Panton’s that existed between modern and postmodern. He made the leap, left behind the sterile materials that all the architects were using, and took on new synthetic materials that were all about colors and shapes. It was no longer about ergonomics and organic materials. Instead, he invented a supersaturated color theory and was famous for saying, "One sits more comfortably on a color one likes." I love that stuff. It exists for reasons other than the modern rules. It doesn’t do that postmodern thing, looking backwards—it is very optimistic and forward-looking.

You mentioned that you visited artist Donald Judd’s home and that, in your view, he really was an interior decorator. He made furniture and was obsessive about placement. Do you identify with the term "interior decorator"?

I cavalierly use the word "decorator": I am old enough to have grown up without openly gay role models. Homosexuals were accepted as florists, hairdressers, and, yes, interior decorators. I am not very militantly gay, but when I identify myself as a decorator it is as close as I get to being so. I do think my work has a gay melancholy or sensibility that is very difficult to talk about, and is not available to all.

The art critic Dave Hickey has referred to your work as having a "utopian optimism" that is "essentially domestic" and of the moment. Can you address the idea of utopia?

I guess I do aim for the perfect ideal. The early work was about the failure of modernism’s utopia to solve all the problems with good design for all. So there is a built-in melancholy of that not being achieved. With some of my newer work, there is the physical reality of human imperfection in hand-fabricating modules. Ultimately, I still believe in the pragmatic populist ideal that nothing is beneath being improved by being well designed. And I continue to remake the world piece by piece, object by object.

Photo by Tom Powel Imaging / Courtesy Jim Isermann and Deitch Projects

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

Related Reading:

From the Archive: This Tribeca Pad Was One of New York’s First Houses Warmed by Geothermal Energy 

From the Archive: Remembering Alexander Girard, the American Master of Colorful Modernism

Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M

Set in Ross, California, the renovated wood-and-stone residence showcases the famed architect’s focus on craftsmanship.

Location: 126 Winding Way, Ross, California

Price: $12,950,000

Original Architect: Bernard Maybeck

Original Year Built: 1905

Renovation Designer: Miranda Abrams

Renovation Year: 2012

Footprint: 5,508 Square Feet (5 Bed, 4.5 Bath)

Lot Size: 1.24 Acres

From the Agent: "This Bernard Maybeck Estate, built in 1906 and restored and expanded in 2012, presents a generational opportunity for the most discerning buyer. The home—known as Grayoaks—features a luxurious primary suite with its own spa bathroom, four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the main level, and another full auxiliary suite. The living level features a living room with restored paneling, a woodburning fireplace, and two sets of Dutch doors that open to the yard and deck, offering expansive Ross Valley views. The kitchen is at center of the home, beautifully outfitted with a 10-foot Carrara island and a gracious family room. This home feels secluded, yet it’s a one-minute drive to the center of town. The estate grounds feature a pool, spa, stone fireplace, terraced garden beds, and areas to roam and explore until the last rays of the sun set over Bald Hill in the distance."

Set in Ross, California, the renovated wood-and-stone residence showcases the famed architect’s focus on craftsmanship.

Photo by Open Homes Photography

Photo by Open Homes Photography

The interiors were reimagined by designer and former homeowner Miranda Abrams. 

Photo by Open Homes Photography

See the full story on Dwell.com: Bernard Maybeck’s First Home in This Bay Area Enclave Just Hit the Market for $13M
Related stories:

• Color Runs Wild in This $5M Brooklyn Town House
• In Upstate New York, a Meticulously Restored Country Estate Seeks $3.1M
• A Cabana Bar and Spokane River Views Anchor This $7.2M Retreat

Burnished Aluminum Sheeting Covers the Entire Ground Floor of This Renovated 1893 Lisbon Home

The material and the ultramarine color covering the exterior hint to the building’s past in an industrial part of town.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Architect: Extrastudio / @extrastudio

Footprint: 2,701 square feet

Builder: Vassalo & Sousa

Structural Engineer: Pedro Viegas

Civil Engineer: Blueorizon

Landscape Design: Oficina dos Jardins

Photographer: Mikael Olsson

From the Architect: "This project is the first in a series of three residences we named Casas Poveras. Shaped in a time of uncertainty, these houses were stripped down to the essentials, acquiring an unexpected, raw, and intense character. Once a landscape of estates and farmland, Marvila became Lisbon's main industrial district in the 20th century. Bounded by the Tagus River and its railway lines, the area is defined by a distinct typology of warehouses for industries reflected in street names like Rua do Açúcar and Rua da Fábrica do Material de Guerra. After decades of neglect, these same warehouses are now repopulated with studios and galleries, making Marvila the city's most vibrant creative district today.

"The project renovates and extends a single-story house built in 1893, fully preserving the existing structure. The existing house was treated as an artifact, its features retained. The new extension alters only the exterior form and a side passage that provides access to the garden. Likewise, architectural elements from the existing facades were removed, restored, and incorporated into the new facades. Old and new were finished in the same way. The different time periods are legible only in the building’s silhouette and the texture of materials. Our clients had two requests for the house: a generous, open, loft-like character and a garage to be seamlessly integrated into the living room, so that it would be possible to work on cars or motorbikes without being separated from the family’s daily life.

"Two gestures define the house. A full-width cut to the front, facing the street, creates a two-story high courtyard, providing shade and privacy for the bedrooms, and, as a counterpart, a triple-height interior space faces the garden, revealing the building’s full vertical scale. Despite the lack of grandeur of the existing house, the project embraces its modesty and imperfections as a register of the past that might otherwise have been lost.

"Punctuated by windows, the back facade is cut at one corner by a vertical strip of light, the result of a legal constraint we chose to embrace, which slices the back facade diagonally. As in Utzon’s Can Lis, for a few minutes at the end of the day, a ray of light slowly enters the space and revolves around enigmatically. Once the design concept was defined, all decisions concerning finishes, textures, and colors were intentionally left open to be made on site with the craftsmen and clients. Their knowledge and decisions were made visible, giving the building a handmade and tactile expression—both rough and refined. Serendipity allowed us to cover the entire ground floor with aluminum sheeting, which was hand-brushed to perfection by one of the craftsmen. Its surface resembles leather: natural, soft, and luminous.

 "The inside walls were left bare, covered only with a gray plaster scratch coat, Jannis Kounelli’s color of our time. We discovered this gray plaster on-site, an economical solution that unified all the elements, while also discreetly linking the house to Marvila’s past. Ultramarine blue, a historical, artificial color that defines the house, was found in the existing building. A pigmented lime plaster unifies the entire volume. Blue being an unstable pigment, each facade had to be finished in a single day, without seams or repairs, a Sisyphean act. This blue layer gives the house an ambiguous appearance, more old than new, yet used in a way that anchors it to the present."

Photo: Mikael Olsson

Photo: Mikael Olsson

Photo: Mikael Olsson

See the full story on Dwell.com: Burnished Aluminum Sheeting Covers the Entire Ground Floor of This Renovated 1893 Lisbon Home