We’re Dana & Colin and we bought our 1966 home in Atlanta in 2020. It was built by P&H Realty, who designed and built hundreds of modern homes around Metro Atlanta in the mid century era. We don’t know much about the early years of our house, but we do know that it was completely untouched and original until 2018, when a massive real estate investment company bought the home from the second owners. They painted everything white and grey and replaced a majority of the original features with cheap products. They gutted almost all of its charm- we’re just so glad they were too cheap to touch the tongue and groove ceilings!

We always knew we wanted a mid century modern home, but wanted something we could move into right away while financially recovering from buying our first home. And if you know anything about Atlanta traffic, location is very important! When we first toured the home we could recognize the potential that it had- move in ready, great neighborhood, great architecture. The bones were great but the aesthetic was not; it was nice having a move in ready home, but the finishes were very much not our style and clashed significantly with the architecture of the house. And as we lived in it longer, those cheap finishes were starting to show their worth.

As we started decorating and planning future renovation projects, we realized how much we appreciated and wanted to honor the original style of the house. We’ve become huge preservationists over the years, and if there was a well-maintained untouched MCM home in our desired neighborhood and budget at the time we probably would have swooped it up, but we honestly just weren’t the die-hard preservationists we are now. We all learn and grow, and it’s pretty dang fun to be able to save a house!

We’ve spent hours, days, weeks, studying dozens of other P&H-built homes, looking at any real estate listing we could, even asking neighbors for tours of their P&Hs. We’re still trying to uncover more information about our home specifically, but we have added back so many original features to date: the avocado green kitchen, slab wood doors, and even stripped paint from the brick.

We still have so many projects planned so stay tuned!