Wish List
French patisserie-inspired style with subway-tiled walls, bright white cabinets, some open shelving and accents of black and metal — but needed help putting it together,” says kitchen and bath designer Alison Griffin. A black-and-white palette emerged, with walls of subway tile accented by marble with beautiful gray veins, silvery metal finishes and dark wood. Looks like the direction I may want to go. Still exploring.
Chris Snook Martin obtained planning permission to build a porch at the back, which now makes a wonderful place to sit and enjoy the view with her dogs, Sid (on the chair) and Maisi. The cushion covers on the chairs are made from old coffee bean sacks. Chris Snook When Martin is traveling overseas, she rents out the house on Filly Island to vacationers. My Houzz is a series in which we visit and photograph creative, personality-filled homes and the people who inhabit them. Share your home with us and see more projects.
Another satellite seating area around a fire pit utilizes rustic chairs, and that’s one of the points. Nearly everything is weathered (what’s another dent or scratch?) or bulletproof. “This house is a good example of how you achieve interiors whose materials are nearly indestructible, but still have it feel pulled together and elegant at the same time,” Davin says.
A small office is equipped with an L-shaped desk. Its pieces were custom designed by Davin, and she added a leather strap detail between the inverted V-shaped legs. The narrow shelves above one desktop are filled with the vintage nozzle and bottle collection of one of the owners. “I love these pieces,” Davin says. “It’s a collection that’s really unique, and the old nozzles have a really pretty patina.” Desk: custom; Spindle side chair: BassamFellows
The home’s exterior is composed of board-formed concrete and full-length planks (from the ground to the roofline) of clear-cut vertical cedar. Devan used Eco Wood Treatment, a preservative that protects wood from aging but gives it an aged look. He then applied a mixture of two transparent stains (one brown and one black) that allows the grain of the cedar to shine through. Before this most recent project, Devan completely renovated an 1880 Victorian farmhouse that he and his partner lived in, only a few blocks from their current home. “My neighbors know me as the guy that turned an old house white and a new house black,” says Devan. “I’m going to have find a new color for my next project.”
Studio AR+D Architects AFTER: Lockyer expanded the kitchen into the original laundry room and moved the laundry to what was once a storage space next to the attached garage. Brightened with the addition of more windows and made more user-friendly with a marble-topped center island, the kitchen is now a favorite gathering spot for the family members, who like to cook, entertain and hang out on the vintage barstools. Custom lacquer and Claro walnut cabinetry provides plenty of storage space.
AFTER: Lockyer removed walls between the original kitchen, dining room and family room and enclosed a small patio to create an open great room that includes living, dining and kitchen spaces with access to the backyard. Popcorn ceilings were also banished and custom linear slot diffusers replaced clunky old-school air conditioning supply vents. When it came to the furnishings in the living space and throughout the house, the architect kept things simple and spare, choosing a mix of new pieces and local vintage finds, such as the coffee table. The owners added a splash of color with custom armchairs.
AFTER: Lockyer revamped the front of the home by removing low garden walls and the remnants of heavy shrubbery to reveal a more open street-side view. In keeping with the local oasis aesthetic, he added palms in front. To make the garden more drought-tolerant, he replaced water-intensive plantings with sculptural cactus. Decomposed granite took the place of some of the original lawn. (After these photos were taken, Lockyer says, much of the grass was replaced with artificial turf.) An offset walkway leads to the new custom front door and sidelight, which replaced a dated stained-glass piece. “I suggested the yellow front door,” Lockyer says. “The color seemed right — and welcoming — in that setting.”
“They really put everything into this house,” Bloomberg says. “This is their dream house, where they want to be for the rest of their lives.” The renovation included the installation of a “smart” home system and photovoltaic panels on the roof, which is lined with solid foam insulation. Equally important to the green components, however, was consideration of the homeowners’ needs as they grow older. For example, the elevator lets them access the second-floor master bedroom and bath and laundry. “All the main necessities are accessible from the elevator,” Bloomberg says. Orange cabinet: custom, Mersoa Woodworking, with Festive Orange 2014-10 paint by Benjamin Moore; frosted-glass sliding door: Sliding Door Co.
Bloomberg looked to the couple’s art collection when deciding on accent colors, like the orange of the dining chairs and the blue of the dramatic first-floor powder room, seen here. Acrylic counter: custom, Acrylite; color-changing LED counter lighting: Eagle Light; Axor Starck X faucet: Hansgrohe; mirror lighting: Artemide; mirror: Ikea; accent paint: Amelia Island Blue 2044-40, Benjamin Moore
There’s a strong combination of fine-tuned decorative steel up against the stronger, more industrial structural steel,” Bloomberg says. “That juxtaposition was a strong design element for this project.” A case in point is the first-floor staircase, in which the blackened-steel framework bolting the stair to the walls contrasts the white steel treads and white railing with frosted-glass panels. Bloomberg’s mix of refined and rough materials is also evident in the aluminum-grate landing that intersects with the second floor’s wide-plank clear maple flooring. Steel staircase structure, railing and treads: custom, Metal Specialties; glass panels: Shower Door King
What was once the front room is now a media room, since most of the public space is at the back of the house. Bloomberg retained the older pine floor in this area, but replaced the rest of the wood with tile flooring. The media room closes by way of aluminum-framed, frosted-glass sliding doors. The back walkway (with wood floor) leads first to the elevator — another important component for aging in place in a multistory home — and then to the kitchen and living room area beyond. “The elevator was very challenging,” Bloomberg says. “It was very small, but it would fit a wheelchair.” Across from the staircase, a pair of doors at right conceals a vestibule leading to a coat closet and the powder room, and stairs to the basement.
The master bath is “one of my favorite bathrooms I ever designed,” Bloomberg says. “It’s not a large space, but we made it look very luxurious” with a combination of high-grade materials and a brilliant blue accent in the form of the cabinetry. The vertical medicine cabinets framing the mirror are custom, as is the 9-foot (2.7-meter) white Corian vanity counter with built-in trough sink. Thinking ahead, Bloomberg designed the shower, which sits flush with the floor and has no door, to be large enough to accommodate a wheelchair if need be. She also custom-designed ADA safety grab bars in the separate toilet compartment, whirlpool tub and shower. As on the first floor, a walkway encircles the second floor’s central core, and part of it passes through the bathroom. “We marked it with a textured runway gray tile to make sure it’s clear,” Bloomberg says. Cabinetry: custom-designed by Kube architecture, fabricated by Mersoa Woodworking; vanity cabinetry paint: Pool Party 2059-50, Benjamin Moore; Studio Gray Matte and White textured bathroom tile: Stone Source; Zen Whirlpool bathtub: Neptune; Axor Uno faucets, Radiance shower head and Unica hand shower set: Hansgrohe; shower glass: Show...
The master bedroom, which faces the street, can be accessed from either hallway. The unusual headboard is fashioned from Viroc, an inexpensive concrete composite that Bloomberg also used for the dining bench and for some of the flooring. “Everyone loves it,” Bloomberg says. “They don’t realize they stepped on it on the stair landing. It looks fabulous vertically.” Orange Slice chair: Pierre Paulin; rug: Neutral Texturas, CB2; Tolomeo bed light: Artemide; wall paint: Amorous AF-600, Benjamin Moore
This view from above illustrates the amount of blackened steel, including two side I-beams, used to frame the glass back wall and to reinforce the brick walls, which now are minus a good deal of the second floor. “The minute you take off that floor, it wants to rack and you have to brace it,” Bloomberg says. Cooling a volume this size, especially in notorious D.C. summer heat, can be tricky. Bloomberg installed a 96-inch industrial fan in the ceiling to pull in air and circulate it to both levels. The second-floor glass-paneled blackened-steel railing echoes the look of the window wall, lending a visual cohesiveness. The wide-plank clear maple flooring here is new.
“The garden is a really important component for them,” Bloomberg says. “They entertain a lot, and they wanted to make it a beautiful place to be.” To further blur the division between indoors and out, Bloomberg continued the interior tile pavers outside, switching to a textured finish and weaving them in with matching poured concrete pavers and jutting Cor-Ten steel planters. Cor-Ten also makes a major appearance in paneled lighting at the back and side garden walls. A slender fountain sends water down a pebbled course that hides the drainage system. “I like the idea of using different kinds of steel and different textures of the same kinds of materials,” Bloomberg says. At night, the patio is softly illuminated with planter-level lighting and lights hidden in the Cor-Ten steel wall panels, similar to the perimeter glow of the blackened-steel panels in the dining area.
The dining area has a visual trick: The bench with its back continues along the wall outdoors, with a 6-foot-long (1.8-meter-long) matching table and chairs. Adding to the blurred lines is the flooring, a ceramic porcelain tile — smooth inside the home, textured outdoors — that continues straight out the glass doors, where it weaves into poured concrete paving. “We wanted the tile all the way through the house, and I had the definite idea that I had to make it feel tied together for consistency,” Bloomberg says. “It feels very European to me. And it’s nice [that] when it’s raining a bit and the doors are open, they don’t have to worry about the maintenance.”
The original kitchen was also set midfloor but faced the side of the house. Bloomberg designed a giant U, and set it squarely central, accessible from hallways on both sides. “She loves to cook,” Bloomberg says of her client. “She lives at this helm in the middle of the house.” Since the client uses the space as an ad hoc office, Bloomberg unconventionally placed two counter seats inside the U facing out with a view to the garden. The Italian Pedini cabinets offer “tons of storage,” Bloomberg says, including a tall wall of cabinets at the back as well as storage space in the outer part of the U. One of the vertical handles along the back is for the refrigerator, while the other opens to a 14-foot-deep walk-in pantry, part of the old kitchen space. A pair of dishwashers facilitates entertaining. Another nod to universal design: The plates and glassware are stored in lower cabinet drawers. System collection cabinetry, sink and sink fixtures: Pedini; Pera swivel counter stools: sohoConcept; countertops: custom Corian in Decorator White; range, oven and dishwashers: Bosch; range hood: Best Hood; refrigerator: Jenn-Air
At night the interior is flooded with light reflected by the whitewashed brick. The centrally located kitchen is lit like the stage it becomes when one of the homeowners cooks. The blackened-steel seat-back on the dining area wall conceals a perimeter of glowing LED lighting.
A space that was once cluttered with interior walls, 8-foot ceilings and a warren of small rooms now offers a clear view from the entry straight to the garden’s back wall. Bloomberg grouped the kitchen, the powder room and an elevator into a central core, as she refers to it. This “not only improved the flow from front to back, but also made room for wheelchair-accessible walkways around the entire floor on both levels,” she says. The wife had the idea of exposing the brick under the plaster — “always kind of risky and expensive,” Bloomberg notes. “And it could be a mess.” While the walls weren’t perfect, they did add texture and character to the modernized space. Bloomberg painted them white, making them a good backdrop for the couple’s artwork. “It makes it look clean,” she says, “and allows the light to go through the whole house.”
A space that was once cluttered with interior walls, 8-foot ceilings and a warren of small rooms now offers a clear view from the entry straight to the garden’s back wall. Bloomberg grouped the kitchen, the powder room and an elevator into a central core, as she refers to it. This “not only improved the flow from front to back, but also made room for wheelchair-accessible walkways around the entire floor on both levels,” she says. The wife had the idea of exposing the brick under the plaster — “always kind of risky and expensive,” Bloomberg notes. “And it could be a mess.” While the walls weren’t perfect, they did add texture and character to the modernized space. Bloomberg painted them white, making them a good backdrop for the couple’s artwork. “It makes it look clean,” she says, “and allows the light to go through the whole house.”
The homeowners “didn’t have a physical vision, just things they like that they shared with us,” Bloomberg says. Among their preferences: the “feel of a New York loft, very modern and minimal; black and white and gray palette with pops of color; efficient; ultraclean; not decorative,” she says. Without children to raise or a future sale to consider, the couple were willing to give up square footage and an extra bedroom to remove the back half of the second floor, opening the rear of the house in dramatic fashion.
This sophisticated couple in their 70s weren’t even engaged when they purchased a narrow row house together in the historic Capitol Hill district of Washington, D.C., and hired architect Janet Bloomberg of Kube architecture to renovate it for them. “They got engaged during the process,” Bloomberg says, “and then got married in the house during construction.” They wanted a house in which they could entertain with style and in which they could grow old. Bloomberg juggled both demands expertly, with careful thought given to maximizing impact while respecting the original structure and preparing the house for comfortable future living. “It’s sort of symbolic for them,” Bloomberg says. “They say a marriage is under construction, just like a house. Exposing the inner workings of this house is like exposing a relationship. We like the idea that you see how it’s made.”
Custom banquette: contractor Joe Hamel; table: Knoll; paint color for benches: Super White, Benjamin Moore; paint color for walls: Copper Harbor SW6634, Sherwin-Williams; paint color for trim: Decorators White, Benjamin Moore; flooring: Marmoleum in Grey Granite, Forbo Flooring Systems
The kitchen’s new gray striated sheet Marmoluem floor almost looks like bamboo, adding needed pattern to the room. “Gray is a great color for livability,” Nelson says. “It doesn’t show dirt as much as other colors.”
The island and perimeter counters are black granite with a leathered finish. “I’m a big fan of leathered finishes, because they hide smudges and fingerprints much better than honed finishes,” Howells says. He and his team removed a wall in the former kitchen to create an adjacent breakfast room behind the blue counter stools. “The room used to be a library, but the homeowners felt it would work better as a breakfast room with the bookshelves.”
Stainless steel appliances continue to be the norm in most kitchens. While its name implies a certain built-in cleanliness, steel surfaces, including countertops, are still prone to rust and stains.
Q