So you’re building a new house in an old neighborhood _ and the last thing you want is for neighbors to complain about another Monster House _ what do you do?

     Well, builders Jim Gold and Linda Sutton and designer Lynn Miller teamed up to create a house of transitions in Willow Glen. First, the Cape Cod style of the new home on Lupton Avenue transitions between a Craftsman on one side and a Colonial on the other. Then, the L-shape footprint of the new house meets the Craftsman’s forward garage on one side and steps back to be even with the Colonial’s deeper entrance.

    "I always build to fit into the neighborhood so no one will gasp at the size of the house or at the style,” said Gold, who lives with Sutton in the home he finished last year. The 4,400 square-foot home sits on a half acre and still includes part of an old fruit orchard. "We chose American Cape Cod knowing that Italianate, a French chateau or a German castle would look absolutely out of place.”

     Designer Lynn Miller of San Jose called upon her childhood memories at her great aunt’s house in Maine. The old house had started small, with a barn out back, and over time the two buildings were connected by a "summer kitchen," she said.

    At the Gold house, the white marble-countered kitchen connects to a barn-like family room, where the walls are wooden board and batten and the vaulted ceilings are tongue and groove.  A giant Palladian window facing the interior yard lets in morning sunshine while a bay window at the back shows off the mature orchard.

    "Growing up in Maine, there are homes that are adjoining pieces, going in a linear way back. It’s a long house, not a broad house," Miller said. "That works beautifully on those deep lots in Willow Glen and the Rose Garden."

    The exterior is shingled, with porches tucked into the spaces connecting the garage to the house, and again at the back of the house where a green metal roof covers a Vermont blue flagstone porch.

    Nautical hurricane light fixtures, from Wright Lighting on San Carlos Street, complete the look.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

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