It's perfect with those flaws

For Joan Childs, southeast Portland, Oregon, is the model New Urbanist neighbourhood: mixed-income and mixed-use, with small-scale streets. “I almost cried realising I was ‘home’,” she said, recalling her first tour of the area after moving there.

Joan, 65, the founder of the market research firm JSC Consumer Insights, and her husband, Jerry Zaret, 71, an account executive at Grey Advertising, had been Manhattanites for more than three decades. Over those years, they shuttled back and forth to a series of vacation houses in Seaside, Florida, the New Urbanist town that was in keeping with their car-free lifestyle.

After retiring in 1997, they spent a decade in Park City, Utah, and Telluride, Colorado, but “living in the snowy mountains and being car dependent just doesn’t make sense in your senior years,” Joan said.

Attracted by the moderate climate and urban amenities, they moved to Portland in 2011, paying $1 million for a building that had been a corner grocery, a printing press and a mechanic’s shop.

The intent was to construct an industrial loft on top inspired by the couple’s former apartment in the Tribeca section of lower Manhattan. “We lived in New York in the heyday of loft conversions,” Joan said. “The rawer it was, the cooler you were.”

A different time

Though the 8,000-square-foot one-storey building had great bones, it also had what Joan called a “go-go '60s-style” exterior. “It was orange and yellow, and it had palm trees outside, which didn’t seem terribly vernacular,” she said. Admiring how

Emerick Architects, a local studio, had rehabbed a nearby Ford Model T factory to fit within the area, where warehouses nudge up against hip restaurants and modest brick houses, the couple hired the firm to take a similar approach for their home.

The 2,400-square-foot second-storey loft is lined with 13-foot-high windows, custom-made to replicate 1930s steel-framed factory windows - albeit in double-paned glass and wood. There are few interior walls; instead, a massive fireplace anchors the main space, where the couple lounge, cook and eat. A single slim bedroom and bathroom are tucked off to one side.

“We added subtle historical cues, so it wouldn’t become a theme park,” Joan said, indicating a nine-foot-square steel fire door that closes off the main room and looks like sculpture as much as a divider. Track lighting imitates an old sprinkler system, punctuated with antique sprinkler heads and pressure gauges for decorative flair.

Most of the furnishings are reclaimed, vintage or locally made. Rough-hewed coffee tables were built with wood farmhouse beams, their surfaces dotted with whorls and swirls. The couple unearthed other items at salvage shops, including a vintage urinal that they turned into their bathroom sink.

Practical, not perfect

“We bought it because of its beautiful rusted patina, but the painters tried to refinish it,” Jerry said. Joan added, “Throughout the project, we had to keep telling the workers: 'No, don’t make it so perfect. An old warehouse shouldn’t be perfect.'” But it can be practical.

A 2,000-square-foot solar array on the roof allows the couple to receive money back from the electrical company every month despite the luxury of radiant-heat floors. Joan keeps planters brimming with chives, lemon thyme and sage in the wraparound garden, which also manages rainwater runoff.

Downstairs, an existing guest apartment was supplemented with a model-train room, bathroom, weight room and two-car garage, where they park their Mini. The other bay is used as an indoor dog run on rainy days. When the project was completed last year, at about $310 a square foot, the couple invited the neighbourhood over. A local blues band played for some 175 people, and food carts were parked outside.

There’s only one aspect of Portland the newcomers haven’t been able to embrace. “I picked out the perfect Dutch bicycle,” Joan said. “But I realised I’m terrified to ride in a city. So my bike sits in the garage and looks pretty as hell.”