When the original owner, Nancy Fields Fadum, died in 2002, her estate left the house to the N.C. State University College of Design. It took a couple like Nick and Julia Fountain to take the plunge to purchase the house, and an architect like Brian Shawcroft to renovate it.

The Fountains had read about the house in The News & Observer in 2003. Shawcroft, who taught at the then School of Design in the 1960s, knew all of the parties involved: Nancy Fadum, original architect James Fitzgibbon, and the Fountains. When the opportunity arose to work on a Fitzgibbon house, he jumped at the chance.

"I'm a great admirer of his," says Shawcroft, who completed the renovation and addition to the house this past fall. "To me it was very important to be a part of this process."

The house demonstrates that Fitzgibbon was a Frank Lloyd Wright devotee, from the dramatic sloping roof and single glazed glass corners to the low ceilings and the built-in storage and furniture.

Like many modernist homes now marketed as teardowns, the house -- at 1,390 square feet -- was significantly smaller than the typical residence of the well-heeled of the 21st century. The Fountains loved the house but needed more space for living and entertaining.

Originally, the washer and dryer were built into the tiny kitchen. Storage areas were minimal. The requirements of contemporary life had outstripped the artfully efficient spaces. The basic structure was still sound: The eastern orientation and large overhangs meant maximum heat gain in the winter and cooling in the summer, as well as a view of the surrounding trees and the golf course beyond.

With the natural materials of cypress, Douglas fir and brick, and the connection to the outdoors through the large expanses of glass, the house was an aging beauty.

The original house, along with the handful of other modernist residences left in the city, is one of the last vestiges of a promising post-war Raleigh that bloomed but never flourished. Just next door is another important modernist landmark, the Kamphoefner House, and the neighborhood has some other examples of work by School of Design luminaries such as George Matsumoto. But the area is not immune from a trend toward larger new houses that some lament as "McMansions." The Fadum House had occupied a double lot; the College of Design sold off the other half of the lot for a very different sort of house.

The renovation

Shawcroft's addition is another wedge shape, set at right angles to the original house. The old and new parts are connected by a neutral hallway with a flat roof.

"It's like a hinge, connecting two equal parts," Shawcroft says.

The new front door in the connector features a raised design of two Fs, for Fadum and Fountain, handmade by Shawcroft.

Separating the two parts with the hallway preserves the views of the original house from the street side. From the golf course side, tied together by the cypress siding, the two parts appear as one structure. The addition, of 600 square feet, is one story throughout, whereas the original house has an upper level with a study.

When renovation began, the house looked a bit different than it had when featured in a 1951 issue of Architectural Record, where it had been praised simply as "House in Raleigh, North Carolina." Originally natural wood with a clear finish, it had been painted dark brown. The house had also sustained damage from a falling tree in Hurricane Fran. The original wiring needed to be brought up to current standards. The Fountains engaged Tom Brown, a local builder.

The first renovation phase was to make the existing structure livable. Because the Fadum House was already on the National Register of Historic Places, any addition had to be approved. The Fountains planned to live there whether they could add on or not. After the initial repairs, they packed much of their "stuff" into two storage units and moved in to get a feel for the space.

"We began to see that really, you don't need all that stuff," Fountain says. "It changed us, and we did learn from living in the house."

As it turned out, it was easy to work with the historic commission, who appreciated the Fountains' love of the house, and the artistry of Shawcroft's drawings.

Shawcroft designed the new addition with the private space of master bedroom and master bath and two walk-in closets, as well as the public space of a screened porch and the utilitarian space of a workshop/potting shed. A full-sized washer and dryer are now in a closet in the master bath. No longer do the Fountains have to choose between cooking or washing clothes in the kitchen, nor do they have to worry about getting lint in their food.

Traditional features

Shawcroft had not designed a screened porch in decades. This one, which opens to the back patio and the golf course beyond, features wood paneling salvaged from a Fountain family barn in the North Carolina mountains.

Another traditional feature is the whole house fan. It's an old North Carolina approach to maintaining comfortable temperatures in the spring and fall, using a louvered system to exhaust the air in the house. This model, The Ghost, is nearly silent, with remote control operation, and is rated to change the air out of the entire house in seven minutes.

One of the keys to the renovation has been matching the old and new cypress and clear fir, and finding a paint color for the trim and soffit that emulates this natural wood color. While the interior wood in the original house has darkened, as all wood does, the new exterior wood and the lighter paint will brighten the house to close to its original appearance.

The addition even features a "green" use of materials: the loblolly pines that had to be cleared were cut into boards and kiln dried, and are now flooring and hall paneling in the new addition.

"I counted 90 years of rings on that tree," Fountain says. "It would've been a shame to send it to the chipper."

It's this sense of history that sets the Fountains apart from many home buyers. Nick Fountain now serves on the Historic Districts Commission.

"We ought to save unique design when we can," Fountain says.

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