Before & After: To Inspire Their Midcentury Renovation, They Toured the Builder’s Own Home

John and Nadia Aazad Dunn had lived in Portland for decades—he moved from Kansas in 1998, she was born in the Southeast neighborhood, and they first met while they both were working at Starbucks—but they didn’t learn about Rummer houses until 2019.

John is a design director who previously worked at Nike, and he first heard about the homes from his coworkers there. "A lot of Nike people own these homes," John says about the residences, which were developed by Robert Rummer, an insurance man turned builder whose goal was to bring modernism to the middle class. Most of his projects are set in the Portland suburbs, where the Nike World Headquarters is also located.

Intrigued, the couple started going to open houses just to look, and they fell in love with the homes’ midcentury style and indoor/outdoor DNA. They were also curious about the communities that have grown up around them. "The Rummers are a cool historical thing to dig into," says Nadia, a civil engineer. "It’s not just that they’re so beautiful and architecturally interesting, but that there’s different pockets of them around town."

Rummer, who died in 2025 at the age of 97, built his first home in 1959. He was inspired by Joseph Eichler, and he hired the same architect, A. Quincy Jones, for his early designs. The focus for these houses was not on the front facade, but on the back. In many Rummer homes, an unassuming front entry leads into an interior glass-walled atrium, around which the house flows, culminating in floor-to-ceiling windows at the rear that frame the backyard.

Before: Atrium

After: Atrium

"You can walk through the house in the nude and nobody will see you," Rummer told Oregon Home magazine of his floor plans in 2012. "Every house in the old days had a big front window and a big front porch where people could sit and watch the neighbors go by. And you go into one of my houses and you don’t know what your neighbors are doing because you can’t see them. The birds know what you are doing. The squirrels."

Rummer built 750 houses between 1959 and 1975 in the Portland metro area, 300 of which are in the modernist style—including his own in the Bohmann Park Neighborhood, which is a veritable time capsule when you drive through its streets today. John and Nadia found their Rummer in 2022 on one of their open house crawls, located just two miles from their previous home, in one of Rummer’s early subdivisions.

Before: Kitchen Entry