5 Historic Houses With Enviable Vintage Style

1. Firm: Rawlins Design.
Site: Fire Island, New York.
Recap: A sympathetic redo of a 1962 beach house preserves the spatial clarity of the original scheme–by Don Page, I.M. Pei‘s former head graphic designer–while tweaking its anachronisms, from a too-large brick hearth (replaced with a floating ethanol fireplace) to the covered entry porch, now a glass-box stair.
2. Firm: Neutral Zurich.
Site: Zurich.
Recap: Hans Demarmels’s 1963 Brutalist dwelling, all jutting concrete forms and monolithic might, gets a dose of levity via a steel dining table powder-coated jaunty yellow, an iconic Marcel Wanders chair knotted from aramide and carbon-fiber cord, and a sardonic print featuring M&M candies.
3. Firm: Polyedre.
Site: Boechout, Belgium.
Recap: In a centuries-old farmhouse, home to an antiques dealer and his wife who exhibit their finds in restored outbuildings, cerulean walls provide a lively backdrop for abstract modernist art by Alfred Reth, Michel Martens, and others.
4. Firm: Lezze Architecten.
Site: Boom, Belgium.
Recap: Glass-and-steel cubes nest like Russian dolls inside an abandoned brick-making factory’s erstwhile kiln to create an architect’s live/work space that sits lightly in its historic setting.
5. Firm: Kayserstudio.
Site: Barcelona.
Recap: Sand-blasted concrete columns and beams lend texture to a 1970’s former factory, now home to a vintage furniture–dealing couple and their midcentury modern inventory, which includes Percival Lafer’s timeworn leather loungers and Pierre Guariche’s cracked-eggshell-shape Mars chair.
> See more from the Spring 2017 issue of Interior Design Homes