The Good Build: A Custom Modern Farmhouse Built on a Narrow Lot in Westfield, NJ

The family always pictured a white exterior with black windows and a red door, and above all the long covered porch that makes a farmhouse read as one. The obstacle was the land: a lot that runs deep but not wide.

The decision that unlocked the house was giving up the attached garage. That freed the width the porch needed, and it did something nobody had counted on — it opened up the light the garage would have blocked. The two rooms that benefit most, the kitchen and dining area and the family room, are the two the family says are their favorites.

It is a useful thing to know before you build: the constraint on a narrow lot is rarely the house, it is what you insist on attaching to it. This was a new build designed and furnished by Ellie Mroz Design with Michael Robert Construction, and Modern Farmhouse Style published it in Early Spring 2023.

The brief for the kitchen was fresh and bright — a white kitchen, but not all white. Natural-stained white maple is what answers that: warmth in the cabinetry and the island so the room reads as light rather than clinical.

Open shelves take the place of upper cabinets along the window wall, which keeps that wall open and airy, puts the decorative pieces in view and the everyday ones within reach. A cascading chandelier hangs over the kitchen table specifically to bring softness to a room otherwise full of hard edges, and a pair of light blue cone pendants over the island are the personality injection the scheme needed.

Handmade tile carries its own argument. Tiles that still show the fingerprints of the people who made them lend a warm softness to a hard-edged room like a kitchen or a bath, which is exactly the kind of imperfection a farmhouse wants.

Nothing here comes from a single metal family. A polished nickel faucet sits in the same room as brass lighting, deliberately, because matching every finish produces a showroom and mixing them produces a collected house.

The wood does the same work across a wider range: dark stained beams overhead, blond floors underfoot, natural maple in between. That mix is the whole recipe. Generously sized, shapely moldings give a brand-new build the romance of old architecture, and vaulted ceilings with exposed beams pull the scale up where the porch pulls it long.

Shiplap paneling gives the bar between the kitchen and the formal dining room a storied feel, the sort of detail that suggests the house has been added to over decades rather than finished last year.

The family room faces the backyard, and that orientation is the point: it lets the household watch the seasons come and go from the room they spend the most time in.

Light wood floors run through it, chosen partly because they are easy to keep clean — or at least easy to keep looking clean, which with children and a garden is the more honest standard.

The primary bedroom is built on the family's own oatmeal-toned furniture, kept as the calm backdrop, with a woven rope light fixture overhead for texture — an unexpected choice in a bedroom and better for it. A mother-of-pearl lamp base adds the one piece of sparkle at the bedside.

Marble is the timeless finish in the primary bathroom. Integrating a material like that and then modernizing around it with the things that matter to you is the most reliable route to a modern farmhouse look, rather than buying the look wholesale.

Laundry rooms and powder rooms are the best places in any house for bold wallpaper. They are small, they are seen briefly, and they can carry a pattern that would exhaust you in a living room.

The mudroom floor is brick, and the reasoning is the most farmhouse thing in the house: if you had converted a porch into a mudroom in an old home, it might well look like this one. White built-in cubbies and a small desk nook do the modern work on top of that older idea.

That is the thread running through the whole build. What we love is the beauty of old homes injected with something more modern for how we live these days.