Case Study: Lessons From the Daliao Extension

Every extension project runs into the same first question: how much of the new volume should try to disappear, and how much should announce itself? On the Daliao house, we leaned toward disappearance — the new fitness studio sits behind the original roofline, so from the street the addition reads as a garden wall rather than a second building.

That decision shaped almost everything downstream. Because the extension couldn’t compete with the main house in massing, it had to earn attention through material instead: a change in floor level, a different ceiling height, and a run of full-height glazing facing the garden that the original house never had.

Reconfiguring the middle of the plan

The harder problem wasn’t the new volume — it was what the extension did to the existing layout. Adding a studio at the back meant the circulation route through the middle of the house had to be rebuilt almost entirely, since the old back door and utility room were sitting exactly where the new corridor needed to go.

We ended up treating the reconfiguration as its own project inside the project: strip the middle third of the plan back to structure, and rebuild it around the new sightline from the front door straight through to the garden. It’s a move that reads as simple in the finished photographs, but it’s the part of the job that actually took the most coordination.

Where the landscaping budget went

Landscaping is usually the first line item to get trimmed when a renovation budget tightens, and on paper it’s an easy cut — nothing about a fitness studio requires a redesigned garden. We pushed back on that instinct here, because the studio’s glazing meant the garden was no longer scenery glimpsed from a window; it was now the view from inside a room people would be looking at directly, at eye level, for the length of a workout.

In practice that meant spending less on hard landscaping (paving, walls) and more on a small number of trees planted close enough to the glazing to frame the view without needing a large garden to do it. It’s a cheaper move than it sounds, and it’s the one guests comment on first.

What we’d carry into the next project

The general lesson: when an extension adds a new kind of room — one where people spend sustained, stationary time rather than passing through — the areas just outside its windows deserve a share of the renovation budget that’s usually reserved for the interior alone.