A design-oriented client acquiring a Midcentury Modern house often finds that the prospective “renovation” turns into “reconstruction.” The typical one-story open-plan dwellings were built with experimental materials and techniques that may not have worn well. Another drawback is the paltry size of the bathrooms and kitchens, which were planned for extreme efficiency in the postwar era, geared to a household without hired help. Tastes change, and those areas now need to be enlarged and updated.

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When a 1957 house by the Modernist architect John Black Lee came on the market in New Canaan, Connecticut, a few years ago, a couple, impressed by the pristine condition of the house and by its expansive 2.8-acre grounds, seized the chance to buy it. They knew of Lee (1924–2016), who had built more than a half-dozen houses in New Canaan. He had a strong affinity to the Harvard Five, a group of Graduate School of Design alumni and teachers (Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, John Johansen, Landis Gores, and Eliot Noyes), who had settled in the Connecticut town in the 1940s and were responsible for a number of significant residences there. Although Lee had a B.A. from Brown University, he had learned architecture and construction through apprenticeships, including at Noyes’s firm, before starting his own practice in 1954.

The clients, Mark Ullman and Taylor Gibson- Ullman, who bought Lee’s long, low, steel-and- wood house, were lucky that it proved to be solid and sturdy. But it did have small bathrooms and a cramped kitchen—and they desired more space. The architect they hired, Joel Sanders, who is based in New York and teaches at Yale’s School of Architecture in nearby New Haven, understood the challenge. “The owners wanted to keep the aura of the house,” says Sanders. “But the question was, how do you renovate and expand sensitively?”

The original 3,600-square-foot house has a shallow gable roof, unlike the flat roofs typical of the period, and is glazed on both long sides. The architect retained the exterior much as it was, only demolishing a small portion of the east end where the original house joins the addition. Deferring to site conditions, Sanders designed it as an extended 2,600-square-foot linear bar to accommodate the new master bedroom, bath, gym, and garage.

To avoid replicating the original roof shape yet give a 12-foot height to the master suite, Sanders inserted into the bar a simple vertical volume that pushes up above the new flat roof. Clerestory windows around this structure admit daylight, and glass doors on the south open off the bedroom to an outdoor terrace. The architect introduced a new material to the composition—bluestone, of an almost charcoal hue, which forms a wall extending from the terrace perpendicular to the wing. Similarly, bluestone cladding on the addition’s front facade further identifies it as an entity separate from the original structure. To unite the new and the old portions of the house, Sanders also “extruded,” as he puts it, the original roof line along the entire length of the rectilinear wing, which reads as a white fascia.

The new stone-clad expansion is what a visitor driving onto the property sees first, but the architect kept the entrance to the original house where it was: it now overlooks a landscaped garden. Inside, he retained the clarity of Lee’s central volume while further emphasizing its openness by removing partitions, including shoji screens that had separated the various living areas. Gray-stained white ash clads storage units and the fireplace core; these subdivide the open spaces between the living room and family/kitchen area. On the west end, the existing three-bedroom wing remains. While this area has been kept intact, some adjustments (e.g., glass showers instead of bathtubs) make the two baths seem more spacious. The rooms themselves are designed for flexible uses, since the three sons are in the process of leaving home. Here, as in the rest of the house, the client worked with Ampersand Architecture, Architect of Record, and Dana Lyon of the Refined Group on the interior furnishings.

The final result is a new expansion that is discrete, yet handsomely complements the original Lee design. By his manipulation of rectilinear planes and use of stone and wood, Sanders has made the living spaces contemporary and comfortable while dramatizing Lee’s contribution to Midcentury Modern.