Honoring The Old With The New: A major Laurelhurst remodel celebrates lives past and present

Take a cramped 1928 English Tudor house with an overgrown yard in a good Seattle neighborhood. Add owners who appreciate its style and comfort, but who find its spaces don't allow them to properly accommodate their mutual passion for cooking or to adequately display the artifacts they love to gather on their frequent travels. Now give them two young daughters who want bedrooms of their own and spaces to play, and the dilemma is clear:

Should the owners move? Should they have the house torn down and rebuild? Or remodel? Fortunately for the neighbors, Graciela and Rick Rutkowski decided to remodel after four years of living in their house and learning what they needed it to be. With the help of architect Richard Fisher, and after nearly a year in a condominium, they moved back into a gracious stucco house that is almost entirely new but looks as if it has always been there.

Fisher, who grew up in the same Laurelhurst neighborhood, understood his clients' desire to preserve the best of what they had while adding space and modern conveniences that fit their lifestyle. "We wanted more square footage and to keep our old house," explains Graciela, who acknowledges that it probably would have been cheaper to do a teardown. (All that remains of the old house are the entryway, a staircase to the second floor and four kitchen windows.) To fully appreciate the transformation, imagine a 2,400-square-foot house with no view, a very cramped second story and a thicket of a yard bordered by blackberries, overgrown rhododendrons and a mature cedar with the top chopped off.

The new reality is nearly double the original square footage. On the new second story, the spacious master suite has a panoramic lake and mountain view. The cedar is gone, as are the brambles and rhodies. The owners are not gardeners, so landscape designer Martha Keck included attractive low-maintenance shrubbery and a lawn where the girls can play. Above a new garage is an inviting small patio featuring a pair of lovely decorative urns rescued from a salvage yard in France. The wrought-iron railing surrounding the small, tiled balcony off the master suite is another find from the same salvage yard. The Rutkowskis spotted potential beneath rust and grime, just as they recognized the potential in their old home.

It's immediately apparent upon entering the house that this family loves antiques, rich colors and a traditional look achieved through fearless combinations of furnishings from different periods. The entryway mirror, for example, is from a flea market in Paris. The red settee in the formal living room is 18th-century Italian; the white one in the master bedroom is 18th-century French. A lovely painted antique side piece in the living room is typical of one you might find in Provence. The dining-room table and chairs are reproductions of the Chippendale style.

"We are pretty influenced by our travels and love picking up pieces," says Graciela, who did the interior design herself after failing to be inspired by the ideas of the professional she first hired. All the furniture and furnishings are either custom-made or antique. Graciela, who has since taken on friends and friends of friends as clients, uses words such as "traditional," "eclectic" and "European" to describe the style of her home. "There are pieces from the '40s along with 18th-century pieces," she says.

The home very much reflects the Rutkowskis' heritage and their life experience. Graciela's father was Czechoslovakian, her mother, Italian. She lived in Argentina as a child, then Alaska. But it was her mother's homesickness that inspired the family's annual pilgrimage to Europe to visit relatives. Rick, an executive in the high-tech industry, is half Italian, half Polish. While he grew up in the United States, he shares his wife's passion for travel. How else would they have found the pièce de résistance for the new sun room — a limestone fireplace mantel once covered with layers of grime. "We live in here," Graciela says of the room, which is flooded with light from two walls of paned windows. There is a television, plus comfortable places to sit, and for a couple who love to cook and entertain, the placement next to their gourmet kitchen is ideal.

"This was our big priority," she says of the kitchen remodel. "We love to cook Italian, but we do French. We do Chinese food. We do Thai. We do almost everything. Our big weekend thing (before the girls were born) was to get our cookbooks out, decide on a cuisine, go to the Pike Place Market and get all the ingredients and come home and cook a fabulous dinner for the two of us. We really, really like to cook. We tag-team it." In the new kitchen, Team Rutkowski prepares those fabulous dinners using an English country sink, a Viking range and Dacor wall ovens.

The new second story includes the master suite, two bedrooms for the girls, plus a bath they share with each other and with guests staying in an enlarged study/guest room. The laundry is also upstairs — an idea borrowed from their condominium stay. The girls' rooms flow off a rotunda that provided another canvas for a special touch — a decorative wooden floor-inlay crafted by an artisan in North Carolina.

The children's rooms also have custom touches such as hand-painted furniture. An enchanting handpainted mural of a tree filled with birds, bees and butterflies moves across the walls of the youngest girl's room. The artist is amazing, says Graciela. "I showed her the curtain fabric and this is what she came up with!" The Rutkowskis have left room to collect more furnishings from the flea markets and salvage yards they'll explore in future travels. But for now they've met their goal of making a once-cramped house comfortably modern and livable.

Karen M. West is a retired Seattle Times editor.