A mid-century hillside house opened up to its view of the river

A 1960s post-and-beam on the hill above the South Waterfront, with the river and the west hills right outside and almost no way to see them. The kitchen sat in its own room at the back, the dining room was walled off, and a narrow slider was the only opening onto a deck that had seen better decades.

The owners wanted one bright space for cooking, eating and having people over, connected to the outdoors, without losing the mid-century character that made them buy the house.

Taking out the interior partitions was the easy part; the roof rides on the beams, not the walls. Cutting a fourteen-foot opening in the rear wall for a sliding glass door was not. That wall carries the beam ends, so the new opening needed an engineered header and posts carried down to the foundation, on a slope where the crawlspace drops away from you.

Exposing the beams meant everything that used to hide in the ceiling (wiring, ducts, the range vent) had to find a new path. We ran a new electrical service, re-routed HVAC through a soffit along the back wall, and vented the hood straight up through the roof. The deck came off and was rebuilt on new footings to meet the new door at floor level.