Vickie and Neal Brauweiler live with their two teenage children in what Mr. Brauweiler, a 54-year-old software engineer, likes to call the “cheap seats” of affluent New Canaan, Conn. The couple were looking for an investment property that they could rent out and possibly take over themselves one day. They found it, for $625,000, in nearby Darien, Conn.
“It was very much a time capsule,” Ms. Brauweiler said about the 941-square-foot cottage, which dates from 1926 and has a gabled roof and half a garage. (The garage is shared with a neighbor; each half of the roof is painted the color of its corresponding residence, like the icing on a black-and-white cookie.)
When the couple went to professionals for renovation advice, they were told that ripping down walls and raising the roof could double the area. But the previous owners, a couple with three children, who had lived in the little house for more than 70 years, piped up, too, if only through the finishes and furnishings they left behind.
“You walk into a space and very clearly have a strong sense of how people were raised,” said Ms. Brauweiler, 53, who was trained as a graphic designer.
This family had a penchant for American colonial, a style that resurfaced in the 1970s for the American bicentennial. Ms. Brauweiler found captain’s chairs, plywood paneling and a metal switch plate representing an eagle clutching a scroll. The scroll was engraved with portions of a quote that read in full: “Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice, and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.” (Ms. Brauweiler keeps the artifact on her desk. “So timely,” she said.)
Many of the rooms still had their rotary phones. Stuck to each appliance was a brightly colored piece of label tape stating the date on which it had been acquired. (The microwave oven appeared to have been a Christmas present in 2000.) “This idea of recognizing every purchase, every choice, is a vote for how we want to live,” Ms. Brauweiler said.
In the garage and basement she found custom workbenches and hooks perfectly customized to the variety of implements that hung from them. “The broom hook, the yardstick hook, the house key hook, the tool hooks — I left as many as possible,” she said. It felt like a violation to disturb them.
In the end, the new owners spent more time deciding what to preserve than deciding what to toss. “I was in dialogue with the house,” Ms. Brauweiler said, “and it spoke to me through the whole process.”
She kept the stolid brick living-room fireplace, as well as the built-in bookcase next to it. She placed portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on one of the bookshelves. “I thought it was in keeping with the house and the theme of responsibility,” she said.
The plywood paneling in one of the two upstairs bedrooms stayed as well. “I didn’t want to make the investment to rip it out,” she said, “and then I made the decision not to paint it over. I embraced it.” In the other bedroom, she left a child’s desk exactly where she found it and added floral Svenskt Tenn wallpaper.
A little table in the glassed-in front porch was moved to a nook off the kitchen, where it lives with the original shelves and the previous matriarch’s broom. The original dining set, in turn, was relocated to the porch. Suspended above it is a paper globe lamp from a party store.
Having been raised in the 1970s, Ms. Brauweiler thought it appropriate to merge bits of her childhood with the interior, furnishing the living room with a sofa from her family home and hanging inherited paintings along with her own abstract composition.
Not everything in the little house could be salvaged. A bright white Ikea kitchen replaced the original, with its eagle-patterned wallpaper. The bathroom was updated. Air-conditioning was installed upstairs because there are limits to the charms of former lifestyles.
All told, the improvements cost about $100,000.
Ms. Brauweiler said she imagined that most other buyers would have torn the house down and replaced it with something bigger. Of the 34 houses currently on the market in Darien, according to Zillow, not one is less than 1,000 square feet, while 16 are more than 5,000 square feet.
“To have such a small home in this particular community is a little bit fun and funny,” she said.
The children who grew up there in the last century, she added, would have managed the cramped conditions because they led outdoor lives, riding their bicycles, enjoying the waterfront a few blocks away. She pictured cars that were smaller than modern-day Suburbans sliding easily into the narrow driveway.
“I don’t want to come across as a romantic,” she added. “What do I know? But I would say there are very strong fingerprints all over the place of a certain integrity that I really admire. A frugality, a dignity.”
She added with a laugh: “Go put that on your Instagram, influencer.”
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