A 125-year-old home marries period details and a strictly streamlined aesthetic Every week, our House Calls feature takes you into homes with great style, big personality, and ineffable soul. Today, we look at how hardware designer and sculptor Carl Martinez applies his minimalist style in a maximalist setting: his Victorian home in Easton, Pennsylvania. ?I wanted to live in a simple manner with few modern amenities in the old bones of this house,? he says.
Martinez, who makes artistic custom hardware, lived in New York City for 20 years before he decided he wanted some nature in his life. Through friends, he discovered Easton, a town of some 27,000 people, which he describes as ?having a well-established artistic community.? After some false starts trying to buy a large building, he stumbled across a brick Victorian, built in the 1890s. ?It looked like it had been abandoned for several years, and I was curious about it,? he says. He was on the porch peering through the windows when the administrators of the Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society pulled up. The Historical Society owned the building, and they just happened by to check on it.

Clockwise from top left: A hallway shows some of Carl Martinez?s design principles for his Victorian home: raw wood, a single bulb, and soft gray walls; in this house, a defunct coal heater is an architectural moment; when the staircase was being painted, Martinez decided to leave ...