Renovation, What’s worth keeping?

: a 1970s home on Jeffreys Road, reconsidered

A well-built seventies house had everything going for it but the decade it was dressed in. Here's how we kept the good bones and let the light back in.

There's a lot to like about a 1970s home, once you look past the surface. They were built with generous, raked ceilings, a real sense of volume, and an easy connection to the garden that many newer houses have quietly lost. The problem is rarely the house. It's the decade sitting on top of it — the burnt-orange ceilings, the teal carpet, the closed-in kitchen, the heavy timber and heavier drapes that make the rooms feel smaller and darker than they really are.

The Jeffreys Road home was exactly this. Good bones, generous proportions, a genuinely lovely raked ceiling running through the living spaces — and forty years of finishes obscuring all of it. The brief wasn't to gut it and start again. It was to understand what was worth keeping, and to let the house become the calm, light-filled version of itself it was always capable of being.