Tom Young
Architect Tom Young has posted a grid of projects on his portfolio website (craft-stl.com), with some plucked from his own house, including a basement redo. He’s dubbed it his basement reMOD—and it’s definitely hipper than your average South City cellar.
The space is the finishing touch on the historic bungalow that he shares with his wife, Sam, and their two kids. When the Youngs bought the house in 2007, it was a mess. They didn’t move in until 2008, after Tom revised the layout and—with help from his father-in-law—ripped out and replaced walls and floors. Though Tom used his expertise to update the room flow and modernize the house, he did his best not to smother its original character.
“I tried to walk a line, to make something interesting within the space, but respect what was originally there—the detail and craft that was put into it,” he says. He wanted a super clean, modern house, though without stripping out the traditional molding or stained-glass windows. (In the 1930s, when the home was built, design was pretty sleek, stripped of the curlicues and bric-a-brac of the Victorian era.) “Details are what make projects for me,” he says. “There are a lot of little details in my house that most people don’t notice, but that’s what makes it for me.”
Tom kept the color palette simple. Though some contemporary houses use bright colors in every room, he stuck to traditional white walls. He hired craftsmen and invested in quality work, rather than expensive materials. (The Youngs’ ages reflect their last name, so they were rehabbing on a budget.)
The basement is a great example of the kind of results you can get with this approach. Descend the stairs—made more-than-utilitarian, with pops of orange on the risers—and the first thing you’ll notice is the ceiling. “It’s just a knotty pine plank that you can buy at Home Depot or Lowe’s,” Tom says. “If I would’ve made that out of a more expensive hardwood, like walnut or cherry, it would’ve been really expensive. It’s just like a utility-grade, paint-grade wood, and if you put a clear coat on it, it looks pretty nice—it’s rustic, but it’s contemporary.”
Tom demolished the floor and dropped it down to get a higher ceiling. “It’s a South City basement,” he says. “So the head height was pretty low.” It was probably the worst way to get more space, he says. “But we were paying all this money to have a new floor put in anyway, so I said, ‘Let’s just go with it.’” The new concrete floors were polished and clear-coated. Just as he’s done upstairs, Tom kept his finishes simple and neutral, bringing in bright color with accessories like lime-green rugs. He designed wall recesses to fit a widescreen, flat-panel TV and added sleek, contemporary storage cabinets along the wall. A ledge along the windows became a great place for art and knickknacks.
In all, the basement remodel added 550 square feet to the living space, expanding the house’s us-able square footage to nearly 2,000. The expansion gives everyone in the family (two adults and two kids, ages 5 and 1) a bit more breathing room. Perhaps even more crucial, the new basement added another bathroom, which always seems to increase a household’s harmony.
“It’s basically a playroom, a place for us to watch movies,” Tom says of the basement’s main space. “And while we were there, we added a bathroom—a nice large bathroom, because I figured if we’re going to do the work, we should make it nice.”
