Berkeley residents Kristin Leimkuhler and Jeffrey Wilk hired McCutcheon Construction to modernize their 1894 Victorian while preserving the building’s traditional exterior. Raising the house by three feet allowed them to transform a six-foot-high unfinished basement into a contemporary wheelchair-accessible first floor, doubling the home’s size to 2,815 square feet.

 

Upstairs, the focus was on returning the home to its original Victorian roots by reusing most of the existing fixtures while augmenting new spaces with found and recycled objects. “Our goal was to restore the house, while modernizing the shared living spaces on the first floor and improving their accessibility,” says Leimkuhler. “We wanted to build a durable, energy-efficient family home that could house three generations comfortably.”