Pamela Lin and her husband, Erwin Tam, had set out looking for a run-of-the-mill, contemporary cookie cutter home with two stories that they could move into without much renovating. But none of the dozens of homes they toured wowed them. Until they walked inside a home designed by well-known California developer Joseph Eichler. Seeing the open-sky atrium surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows and the open floor plan, Lin and Tam's style compass completely shifted.
Turned out, they weren't lovers of contemporary style at all; they were midcentury modernists at heart. Another thing they soon discovered: Lin is a natural designer. A full-time project manager for Google at the time, she reached out to a few professionals, but her tastes were so particular that she just decided to design the whole house herself, reimagining the kitchen and bathrooms and choosing furnishings, materials and paint colors.
Two of her fellow Googlers saw the end result and each hired her to do their homes. Then a neighbor's friend saw the house, knocked on her door, and hired her. After that, a different neighbor procured her services as well. With such demand, Lin decided to start her own interior design company, Urbanism Designs. Urbanism Designs , original photo on Houzz. AFTER: She removed some bushes, added an ipe wood deck at the far end of the pool and had new concrete poured right on top of the old layer.
She also added Mexican pebbles and replaced the lawn with artificial turf. Lin researched Eichler homes because she wanted to preserve the Eichler feel but modernize it slightly. Previous owners had already altered a few features — they had removed some original interior wood paneling and painted the ceiling, for example — but she tried to keep the structure as original as possible.
The exterior form is virtually unchanged apart from new paint. Lin also added frosted glass to the front door sidelight, changed the side fence to ipe wood and added landscaping steps and concrete planter boxes, which she designed based on a photo she saw on Houzz.
