Setting the Stage for Modern Living in a Historic Home

By Julie Jaskol | July 18, 2025

Designers and architects who specialize in historic homes often walk a fine line. How do you remain authentic to an older home while accommodating contemporary lives?

That is the essential question for Sara Zofko, who designs interiors ranging from Victorian to Craftsman to Mid-Century Modern and beyond. “There’s a delicate balance between living well and maintaining architectural integrity,” she said. “We need to adapt to the comforts we have become accustomed to and enjoy. You want to pay homage to the house. But you don’t want to live in a museum.”

The process begins with learning as much as you can about the house. “My first step in any project is rooted in research,” architect Jen Dunbar, who specializes in restoring or reconstructing historic homes, said. “When was the house built, who built it, who lived in it? What was happening around the time it was built, who was it built for?”

She searches for documentation. “Photographs or drawings that allow you to put things back in place. If you have that, you can recreate it,” she said.

Zofko concurs. “We don’t just ask clients what they’re looking for, we search for every document we can find about the house.”

For artist and designer Karen Hovde, who specializes in Craftsman design, it can be a treasure hunt. “In a historic home often things have been removed over the years, and I can bring them back,” she said. “Floors have been replaced, walls removed, and a client will say ‘Oh, there are old cabinets in the garage,’ or neighbors will say ‘the old pocket doors are still in the wall.’ Those are magical moments.”

What you can’t restore or find in the basement, you try to recreate authentically.

“Any older historic house always has some rules to work with, depending on the style or the architect,” Dunbar said. “You work with certain ground rules to make those spaces feel harmonious, whether it’s scale or proportion of room or size of windows or ceiling heights. Working within those ground rules allows you to be transformative with a renovation. It allows you to respect the history and bones of a house but make it contemporary in a way.”

Frequently guidelines are codified in historic districts that protect homes and neighborhoods. “There are bureaucratic extra layers of work for a lot of homes in historic neighborhoods that maintain a sense of place,” Zofko said. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “With those restraints come great creativity as well.”

Once you learn as much as you can about the house, you learn as much as you can about the client. “Do you have kids? Do you like to drink coffee in the mornings? Look at the sunset? We’re not changing the footprint of the house, but what do you love and what do you wish you had?” Hovde asks her clients.

One homeowner longed for a music room. Hovde created one on a roomy stairway landing with a rug, comfy chair, and instruments on the wall

Often the biggest challenge is reconciling the snug proportions of an older home with a contemporary family’s sense of space.

“We battle all the time the misconception that you have to have a ginormous living room, and a ginormous kitchen to be efficient,” Dunbar said. “You can have a smaller room and still feel like you have a lot of space. That was the priority when many of these houses were built, to have highly intensive, useful spaces.”

Likewise, Zofko finds herself resisting today’s fondness for open great rooms. “I’m a big fan of keeping kitchens in back of house and keeping walls up,” she says. “Kitchens were never supposed to be pretty and now they are. And let’s make space for a hearth room without making it a living room. I prefer a hearth room over an open concept.”

Hovde finds herself rescuing clients who’ve filled a contemporary room with Arts & Crafts furniture and find that it doesn’t look Craftsman. “You know, the ceilings are too high, the walls are white, and the windows are different sizes, but in Craftsman construction all walls need to interrelate, and typically the heights of windows need to be same,” she said. “A lot can be done with molding, stenciling, wallpapering, lighting, and paint color, which are far more important than furniture.”

For Zofko, strict historical accuracy is not necessarily the goal. She will pair a modern sofa with a historic rug to create a room that looks like it was assembled over time. “You can maintain a connection with history in certain pieces,” she said. “Hard goods and rugs are great ways to do that. Sofas are not.”

All agree that kitchens and bathrooms are the most important places to achieve the balance between yesterday and today. For designer Hovde, Craftsman-style bathrooms can be relatively simple to achieve in a home that’s been awkwardly modernized. “Use 3x6-inch tile on the walls with color accents, take out the shower curtain and build a wall with an arch over the tub,” she said.

Zofko doesn’t hesitate to do a more comprehensive re-do. “Reconfiguring a bathroom is absolutely worth the investment in an older home,” she said. “Creating space that looks like it’s from an original floor plan is possible with a little ingenuity and creativity. A bathroom can be as luxurious as you like without sacrificing integrity.”

As for kitchens, Zofko swears by cladding appliance panels with cabinet facing, and integrated hoods, either stucco- or cabinet-clad, making kitchens less anachronistic and more integrated into the overall aesthetic of the house. “Stainless steel—I don’t want to see it anywhere,” she said. “The less metal you can see, the homier and historic a house can feel.”

Dunbar recently completed a kitchen redesign in a Craftsman home. “It feels like a kitchen that’s both been there for a while but is very contemporary,” she said. “It gave my clients a way to put their imprint on the house and add to it.”

Although the room retained its original size, it feels much bigger. “We raised the ceiling back to its original height and changed the layout. When we took it down to the studs you can see what was done in the past. That’s the forensic architecture,” she said.

“This is a very modern house, with state-of-the-art technology. It’s a very interesting aspect of this project—high regard for craftsmanship and also taking it into the future. It’s contemporary for the family but connected to Craftsman roots.”

For Dunbar, this is an example of staying true to the spirit of a house even as you modernize aspects of it. “This is a little woo-woo, but it’s important to infuse a positive spirit back into the house,” she said.

“I have a project where we jokingly say we are dressing the girl up for a party and she’s really happy, because we closely listened to the house and brought it back to its original glory, exorcising the bad negative vibes,” she said. “There’s a spirit to a house – you know, sometimes you walk into a house and there’s something wrong? In other houses you walk in and it immediately feels warm and inviting. It all comes down to the spirit and joy that goes into working on a house. It leaves an imprint of happiness.”

It’s about the integrity of the design, Zofko said. “When you’re doing something authentic it is beautiful as long as it’s done to the highest level,” she said. “There’s beauty in every era, as long as it’s true to its highest form and the basic design principles of color and proportion and how clients are going to live their life in the space.”

For all the constraints of historic design, Hovde rejoices in its freedom from trends. “I don’t have to keep up with fashion,” she said. “All these people painting their houses black – they’ll all be out of style in a few years.”

But a well-loved and cared-for historic home remains timeless. “That’s why people love older homes,” Dunbar said. “There’s this connection to past lives and history, to somebody else who loved the house added their own touches to it. They’re more than just a box. There’s an imprint that somebody left.”