Senior-friendly addition to two-story colonial

The elderly father of this client lived out-of-state, and she wanted to add on to their home with his special needs in mind. Though not confined to a wheelchair, his age dictated that we provide a space for him to move into that would be easy to navigate independently if, in the future, his mobility was compromised. I designed extra-wide doors on his bedroom suite and private bath, and provided lots of floor space in the bathroom. I also positioned his bedroom suite off of the main living space so he's only a shout away, but with a small vestibule between it and the kitchen for some privacy.

The family members are quite musical, so the addition includes a separate Music Room with a box bay for lots of light, and French Doors connecting it to the Living Room. I designed the structure so that the roof plane of the existing covered front porch continues across a portion of the Music Room. This blends existing with new, making the end product look like a home that was designed like this from the very beginning.

The clients also wanted an upstairs recreation room, with space for a billiards table, so I took great care to design a second floor space with depth, roof pitch, and roof lines to mimic the existing second floor wing on the opposite side of the house, over the garage. Whenever a large addition is added to a moderately-sized home, there is always a danger that the addition will overwhelm the original home. My intent is to always trick the eye of someone seeing the home for the first time into believing that there never even was an addition! Another design element I came up with, in order to pull the look together, was to add two decorative gables on the front of the existing house. The addition featured a gabled bump-out at the second story, but there were no existing gables on the front of the original home; by adding one on the main roof and another one over the existing garage, I was again working toward the creation of the "Addition? What addition?" look.

Here are the "before" photos of this home:

And more photos when the addition is nearly completed:

With final grading and new grass, if you'd never seen the "before" photos, would you have known what was original construction and what was new?