A sensitive renovation has revived the architecture of a classic late 19th-century American Four Square in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Surrounded by elegant new gardens, the home’s gracious summer porches have been rejuvenated and enhanced for 21st-century owners. Embellished with flowing draperies and a new network of terraces, these outdoor rooms preserve the legacy of a distinguished past while fully engaging in today’s lifestyle.
Porches have long provided the defining drama of the house, but the latest remodeling effort by architect Donald Lococo has added substantially to their impact. The architect designed a system of interconnecting porches, terraces and walkways to encircle the residence. With access through French doors from almost every room on the main floor, the owners can now enjoy the full measure of indoor-outdoor living.
The vision of a “circuit” was Lococo’s, but the architect credits owners Stephen and Ellen Conley with “the whole conceptual idea of gracious terraces.” The couple purchased the house in 2007 and spent months getting to know the half-acre property before starting their renovation. They knew that ultimately its success would also depend on expert landscaping to enhance the views, and intelligent interior design to set the mood.
Even before closing on the purchase of the home, the Conleys turned to Mary Jo Donohoe of M J Interior Design. She had decorated three of their previous residences and appreciated the needs of a family with three adult sons and a daughter in college. These included expanding the kitchen and family room and fitting out the lower level to accommodate serious sports fans on game days. To overhaul the gardens, they called on Donohoe’s brother-in-law, Bob Hawkins of Hawkins Signature Landscapes.
Ellen Conley’s initial instinct was to add a fireplace in the family room. That determination led to a significant extension, plus the addition of a breakfast room and renovation of the kitchen, and a realignment of space on the second floor—including the creation of an outdoor garden off the second-story master bedroom and new dressing rooms and bathrooms. The basement was excavated to create a home theater, wine room and fitness center.
Ironically, when the Conleys tapped him to design their renovation, Lococo already knew the house inside and out, having completed a makeover of the home a decade earlier for a previous firm. French doors and classical columns at the front entrance date from that project, as does a small family room. In the Conleys’ expansion, Lococo sized the new space based on a “rhythm” of French doors flanking a monumental 18th-century French fireplace acquired from an antiques dealer on the Eastern Shore. The piece was cut to fit by an expert stonemason.
“This final owner really did what the size of the space wanted to be,” says Lococo. “The meter of the French doors created the size of that room.”
Even in historic Chevy Chase, this dwelling has been accorded special distinction, as Lococo delights in revealing. The original owner, Clarence Moore, had been a master of the Chevy Chase fox hunt and a skilled oarsman as well as a banker. In 1912, after journeying to England to scout hounds, Moore boarded the Titanic. Newspaper accounts report his final heroic hours helping women and children into lifeboats. He is said to have declined an opportunity to row the last lifeboat away and, with a friend, leapt into the icy waters as the ocean liner exploded.
Today, the sound of the Conleys’ two dogs padding along the dark-stained polished floors seems entirely appropriate for a master of the hunt. The Conleys have thoroughly revived Moore’s house, while respecting the proud spirit of its past. Rough-hewn Pennsylvania barn timbers known as “summer beams” give the family room stature. Narrower summer beams continue the motif into the breakfast room and kitchen. “The house had beautiful traditional foundations,” Donohoe says. “It’s a romantic old house. We updated it for a modern family.”
Lococo’s plan ensured that breezes, light and views flow from porch to porch and room to room. The dining and living rooms open to a dining terrace, which leads to a new “television terrace” with an outdoor fireplace. That space adjoins an outdoor cooking area at the back of the house, which is accessible to the family room. A walkway continues full circle around a new breakfast room to an elegant sitting porch shaded by a grand old specimen beech tree along the front walk. As Lococo intended, visitors experience “an entire circuit through the porches.”
Lococo also finessed the property’s freestanding garage, which sits in full view of the breakfast room. He transformed the former eyesore into a charming presence with eyebrow windows on a new roof. Hawkins supplied the perfect apple tree topiary to enliven a blank garage wall. Today, when viewed from the house, the structure resembles a storybook cottage.
Donohoe aimed for sophistication in the interiors, with Venetian plaster in the hallways and luxurious touches, such as Ann Sacks stone mosaic tiles in Ellen Conley’s bathroom and rhinestones decorating the vanity chair. Cabriole-style legs on a contemporary daybed are Lucite.
The landscape design is equally sophisticated. “When we took over the lot, it was mostly wooded,” Hawkins recalls. The property is now neatly edged in a velvety embankment of liriope spicata. Using a mixture of hardscape and elegant plant material, he established focal points along the circuit around the house, to create “a little bit of a ‘wow’ factor in each spot.”
Elegant herringbone-patterned brick walkways curve around the house and terraces. Bob Hawkins emphasized the notion of a circuit by laying circles of brick at key points along the walkways. Just beyond the dining terrace, a semi-formal garden is enlivened with a circular fountain. A parterre of bedding plants is edged with low boxwoods.
To keep the landscape relaxed, a staircase of stone slabs emerges on the lawn, and boulders are strewn here and there amid a magnificent row of tulip poplars with an understory of dogwood. Hawkins replaced overgrown shrubs with an airy border of holly, crape myrtle, hydrangea and nandina, providing seasonal color as well as a luxuriant screen for neighbors to enjoy.
On a recent summer evening, three of the Conleys’ adult children gathered in the spacious family room. Light streamed in from the French doors and dogs scampered. As Donohoe noted, “It’s sort of an empty nest, but never empty.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design.
RENOVATION ARCHITECTURE: DONALD LOCOCO, AIA, Donald Lococo Architects LLC, Washington, DC. INTERIOR DESIGN: MARY JO DONOHOE, M J Interior Design, Bethesda, Maryland. LANDSCAPE DESIGN: BOB HAWKINS, Hawkins Signature Landscapes, Bowie, Maryland. RENOVATION CONTRACTOR: CARL PETTY ASSOCIATES, LTD., Washington, DC.
MARCH/APRIL 2012
In the dignified Northwest Washington enclave of Wesley Heights, the weight of tradition is no trifling matter. Azaleas and antiques have long ruled and charting a modern course can require courage. In a renovation of their Georgian-style house, Christopher and Richard Cahill took pains to embellish the past while bringing fresh sensibilities to bear.
For starters, they dared to paint their living room black. “The only way you can do it is to have big windows,” cautions Christopher Cahill, owner of an eponymous design-build firm and the landscape company Botanical Decorators. As he speaks, his living room is bathed in morning sunlight. “Black reflects light,” he explains.
Over the past year, the Cahills updated every square foot of their four-level, five-bedroom house. They refreshed the stately gray brick exterior, which presides over a neat border of boxwoods. Indoors, walls and wallpaper, including an elegant chinoiserie, came down. Acres of white solid-surface kitchen counters were supplanted by green granite. In the breakfast room, a 1980s-vintage Palladian window was replaced with a rectangular transom. The second floor master suite got a reconfigured dressing room and a luxurious bathroom, both with garden views.
The Cahills, who like large-scale entertaining, installed a catering kitchen on the lower level, steps from the garage. Christopher and spouse Richard, who works in financial services, have also prepared for the arrival of an infant, who will bring a lively new dynamic to the home. In anticipation, the owners took down a wall on the first floor, blending the former dining room with the kitchen and breakfast room. The result is a relaxed family room as the new nexus of the house. French doors provide easy access to the garden. A former study has been co-opted as a dining room. “We wanted a home that felt comfortable; the goal was light and cheery,” says Christopher Cahill.
The Cahills also tackled the two-tiered garden, which rises steeply behind the house. Crucial retaining walls were rebuilt and steps to the upper lawn redesigned. The patio was expanded to make space for a fireplace—a move that required carving out part of the hillside, where two mature trees established themselves decades ago. Cahill estimates that his crews removed 72 tons of earth, old stone and plant material before bringing in 115 tons of new materials—all transported by wheelbarrow. Cahill saved the trees and a hammock now swings between their massive trunks near a round of turf just big enough for a swing set.
“We use the fireplace all the time,” Cahill says.
In his previous home, the designer luxuriated in a glass-walled contemporary townhouse with a black leather-and-steel Bauhaus vibe. His Web site still lists Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the architect he most admires. The new home’s interior is notable for a softer zeitgeist, with natural materials and a palette ranging from sea green to mushroom to sandstone in much of the house. The living and dining rooms do bring a punch of black and white, and there is plenty of glass and steel. But 1920s Modernism has matured into 1960s sophisticate.
The style note is appropriate. The house was built in the 1960s on land carved from a neighboring lot. The living room décor echoes the manner of David Hicks, the legendary English designer who popularized black walls in the 1960s. Furnishings also lean to a Hicksian blend of contemporary and vintage pieces with abstract art. The simple panels of harvest-gold-and-white printed cloth at the windows recall Hicks, but also the playful textiles of the American Mid-Century designer Alexander Girard.
The dining room is a cooler blend of black, white and silver. Contemporary lacquered chairs share the setting with a blown-glass centerpiece by Dale Chihuly atop a dining table with 18th-century French accents. The soothing backdrop is a stencil-like wallpaper pattern of acanthus leaves in black on white. Cahill delights in mentioning that the paper cost just $95 a roll. “I’m frugal,” he says.
However, he admits to splurging on rugs—antique in the living room, Tibetan wool in the halls and master bedroom. But he declined to invest in hand-woven fabrics. “You can’t really tell the difference,” he contends. What’s more, spending less on decoration at the outset makes it easier to alter the décor when he tires of it. “It gives you the freedom to change,” he says.
The house came with eight-foot, four-inch ceilings, so Cahill added layers of crown moldings and topped windows and doorways with broad bands of white trim to “lift the eye upward.” The enhancements also add to the feeling of being in a historic house.
As Cahill pointed out the architectural details, daylight played tricks with the living room walls, shifting the color from black to anthracite to something else entirely. “In summer the walls appear green,” the designer says. “At night, people ask if they are navy blue.”
He seems especially happy to share the effect, and he promptly explains his reason: “It’s the first home that I’ve done exactly as I wanted it done.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Stacy Zarin Goldberg is a photographer in Olney, Maryland.
RENOVATION, INTERIOR DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION: CHRISTOPHER CAHILL, Cahill Design Build, Washington, DC. LANDSCAPE DESIGN: BRIAN HAHN, Botanical Decorators, Olney, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home design and building/remodeling features. Wonderful visuals of custom homes and eco-friendly resources are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design and remodeling projects to life.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011
"There are no rules anymore,” says Washington interior designer David Mitchell. From his Connecticut Avenue office, Mitchell overlooks the bustle of Dupont Circle. His enormous vintage work table is bare, except for a silvery laptop. The underpinnings of rooms-to-be occupy every other available surface. Rolling tubs stashed under tables hold thousands of fabric swatches. Smooth ceramic pots, familiar shapes to Mitchell fans, await transformation into table lamps. A carved wood artifact from America’s agricultural past is stationed temporarily atop the mantel, a worn fragment of our collective memory. Such inspired objects only hint at the textures, soothing colors and subtle patterns that Mitchell combines to make fresh, livable interiors.
David Mitchell has long been known for richly combining the elements of the trade. In less judicious hands, mixing patterns and textures could create undercurrents of distraction. But whether the décor is on display at a show house or in the home of a private client, Mitchell applies his Zen-like dedication to calm. His prime mission is achieving harmony.
“It’s all about how subtle it is,” he says.
In the home of a young family in Bethesda, Mitchell varied textures, colors and surfaces to achieve a rare mix of serenity, sophistication and practicality. (The household includes three children under the age of eight.) A bold trove of nature-inspired textiles, with motifs ranging from Moroccan to Folk Art to Scandinavian Modern, is the lively result. “It’s an old house,” says the designer. “We wanted to interject a young spirit.”
The entryway introduces the color palette. Folk-art inspired floral wallpaper climbs the stair wall. Its loosely accurate botanical forms exude shades of rust, blue, green and gold. A settee is upholstered in bittersweet wide wale corduroy welted in pale blue cotton. An embroidered pillow from India “helps to carry the story of the house,” Mitchell says. An antique Oriental rug protects the floor.
“The entrance hall is so welcoming that it sets the tone of the house,” says Mitchell. “It’s not only sophisticated, it’s fun.”
In the living room, the owners’ Hudson River landscape painting provided a starting point. Its companions now include vintage, antique and contemporary furniture as well as plenty of comfortable upholstery. Mitchell chose a pale blue linen textile to cover a deep Jean-Michel Frank sofa. The walls were painted celadon. “There had to be a blue-green palette,” Mitchell says, to reflect the importance of water in the landscape painting.
In order “to build a textural story,” the designer chose a rug with a pattern based on the form of an old Irish metal gate. The colors—soft blue, leaf green and natural, punctuated with terra cotta—were customized to blend with the sofa and the bouquet of fabrics lavished around the room. Tailored “Fifth Avenue” chairs are covered in a small-scale leaf print in natural tones interspersed with blue. A generous, skirted ottoman wears embroidered cotton in a fantasy floral pattern embellished with warm terra cotta. Sofa pillows pick up the palette in an elaborate trellis print. Simple draperies in a matte fabric are woven with satin flowers, which shimmer at night.
Furnishings are subtly dramatic. A minimalist wood coffee table started life 800 years ago as a gilded Chinese prayer table; its mottled surface now glows with age and protective coating. Lacquered “gourd tables” are stationed beside cushy upholstered chairs.
A dozen smooth white ceramic pots from Belgium occupy a long narrow table by the window, their glaze catching soft light from outside. Their rounded forms suggest the organic aesthetic of mid-century designer Eva Zeisel. Mitchell often turns them into contemporary lamps.
The blend of old and fresh extends to upholstery. Antique Empire chairs depart from the formal conventions of their era when Mitchell covers them in a simple cream-and-blue cotton stripe. An antique wing chair is updated with a cotton textile printed with lively ferns. With a house full of small children, stain- resistant treatments are a must.
Scale is key. “Nothing too big when you use a pattern on furniture,” Mitchell cautions. “You want it to ‘move,’ not to assault the furniture.”
In the dining room, pale aqua walls are glazed and combed to look like linen. “Paint adds the atmosphere in a room,” says Mitchell. The owners kept their round dining room table and added new chairs. “The backs of the chairs become more important with a round table,” Mitchell points out. Armless upholstered chairs with a slightly swooping profile have been dressed in a classic stripe for contemporary entertaining. Above the table, Mitchell chose a chandelier with almost industrial roots. The wood and stripped-metal structure is hung with rock crystals. By the window, a pale Gustavian bench is upholstered in a washed linen printed with an equally pale floral pattern. To give the bench an ethereal backdrop, Mitchell hung draperies of embroidered wool challis.
Stronger colors and patterns turn up in the sunroom. Swedish captain’s chairs are upholstered in caramel-hued cut velvet in a 1960s-like floral pattern. A vintage wicker chair gets a lighter touch, with two-tone cotton printed in a delicate Moroccan motif. Overstuffed pillows are dressed in “burnt-out velvet” or oversize bittersweet-and-green checks. The ottoman coffee table is upholstered in a tawny stripe. The pale floor rug is woven in a soft floral.
“Even if you like neutrals, you can interject color,” says Mitchell. “Just make sure everything harmonizes.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Photographer Laura Resen is based in Chatham, New York.
INTERIOR DESIGN: DAVID H. MITCHELL, David Mitchell Interior Design, Washington, DC.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011
In the struggle to define domestic space, battle lines often wobble between modernists who love lofts and traditionalists who occasionally like to close doors behind them. In a clean-lined town home in Cathedral Heights, contemporary-spirited owners illustrate a third option: Spaces are framed, but never closed in.
From the street, the duplex villa on “Alban Row” exudes tradition appropriate to its setting on Mount Saint Alban, where Gothic Revival remains a revered style. The couple had chosen a three-story city residence with underground parking and an elevator, an ideal choice for visiting parents. But despite 11-foot ceilings and windows on the east, west and north exposures, the loft-like first floor was dark; a 10-foot-long granite countertop protruding from the kitchen into the center of the house was also a problem. Moreover, the undefined layout that suited its previous occupants was unworkable to the new owners. “We don’t entertain large groups,” the new lady of the house pointed out. “We wanted something more fitting to our lifestyle.”
The couple began a year-long retrofit to transform the vast space into an intimate home—without taking a single step backward in time. They turned to Cunningham | Quill Architects to reclaim traditional functions—living room, dining room, kitchen and library—without building walls. Principal architect Ralph Cunningham enlisted project architects Maria Casarella and Michael Day, along with Angela Yu as project designer. “It was a bowling alley space,” recalls Casarella of the original floor plan. The team drew on an array of architectural devices to re-establish order and still retain the open quality of the space.
The home’s interior was, and still is, anything but traditional. The architects devised cabinetry to shape views, with big open frames atop storage consoles. Ceilings were dropped slightly to create a sense of intimacy in the living and dining areas. Trim was installed over doorways to draw the eye upward. To unify spaces and add sophistication to plain woodwork, patterns were scored on walls, floating ceilings and doors.
Today, the interplay of ebonized wood, cream surfaces and white trim is as fresh and relaxed as the couple’s vintage Donghia chairs and collection of Mid-Century Modern classics. The serene ambience gives little hint of the scope of change. Windows on the long north wall were enlarged and are now adorned with chic rolling screens. Casarella also upgraded a series of hidden service spaces—a closet, a powder room and a butler’s pantry—along the home’s shared south wall. By encroaching on 12 inches of prime floor space, she realigned a powder room door (it no longer opens into the living room), tucked a gas fireplace into the living area and turned a closet off the dining room into an occasional bar and workstation.
The new cooking area is a sleek maple box, with emphasis on efficient storage. As for dismantling the oversized, professional-style kitchen with its seating area and fireplace, the owner reasons, “We didn’t need two dishwashers or a 48-inch fridge.”
Casarella attributes the success of the project to an observation she made about her clients: “They are architects at heart.” Years ago, the owners had experienced the power of architecture, having built a house from scratch with Washington architect Heather Cass. That light-filled, frankly contemporary retreat had floor-to-ceiling glass fronting the Potomac River. Three moves later, Cass directed the couple to Cunningham and Casarella—both former colleagues—for their latest project.
Casarella worked long distance on the design, receiving photos and furniture dimensions from the owners, who preferred to retain cherished pieces rather than jettison them. The dining room was calibrated to fit a rectangular glass-topped table from a house in Norfolk. The sofa in the library, to the right of the foyer, was reupholstered. The Donghia chairs date back to the Cass riverfront house. The bed and armoire were acquired for an Atlanta condominium. Surrounded by these familiar possessions, the owner explains, “It’s not like you’re in a totally new place.”
The remodeled house seamlessly blends indoors and out, making the interior seem far larger. The landscape team of Jay Graham and Sarah Trautvetter of Graham Landscape Architecture in Annapolis replaced a conventional wrought iron gate with an enclosure of dark-stained îpe, offsetting the panels to frame glimpses of a secret garden at the end of a lush passageway while still blocking views from the street. The garden itself is a composition of dark-stained îpe, slate and evergreens. A floating fence of horizontal boards echoes the interior partitions while also disguising a high brick boundary wall. The dark wood backdrop sets off a gleaming steel sculpture and a small, mirrored water wall, visible through double doors from the kitchen. A wood seating wall surrounds raised beds where a paper bark maple, masses of coral bells and a few boxwoods are taking root.
“We were playing off the interior,” says Jay Graham. “We borrowed ideas from inside. The garden became another room.”
Upstairs, Casarella continued the scoring of walls and doors to lend “comprehensive touches throughout the house.” The second level is essentially a master suite. An office enclosed by maple cabinetry has a lowered ceiling over the work area. A window wall admits daylight through an adjoining television room. The third floor serves as a guest suite, but the owner has taken the west-facing sitting room for a home office. Atop Mount Saint Alban, her choice makes perfect sense. “It has the best view in the house,” she says.
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Bob Narod is a photographer in Herndon, Virginia.
ARCHITECTURE: RALPH CUNNINGHAM, FAIA, principal in charge; MARIA CASARELLA, AIA, and MICHAEL DAY, AIA, LEED-AP, project architects; ANGELA YU, AIA, project designer, Cunningham | Quill Architects, Washington, DC. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: JAY GRAHAM, FASLA, and SARAH TRAUTVETTER, Graham Landscape Architecture, Annapolis, Maryland. CONTRACTOR: MACON CONSTRUCTION, Kensington, Maryland.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011
In the struggle to define domestic space, battle lines often wobble between modernists who love lofts and traditionalists who occasionally like to close doors behind them. In a clean-lined town home in Cathedral Heights, contemporary-spirited owners illustrate a third option: Spaces are framed, but never closed in.
From the street, the duplex villa on “Alban Row” exudes tradition appropriate to its setting on Mount Saint Alban, where Gothic Revival remains a revered style. The couple had chosen a three-story city residence with underground parking and an elevator, an ideal choice for visiting parents. But despite 11-foot ceilings and windows on the east, west and north exposures, the loft-like first floor was dark; a 10-foot-long granite countertop protruding from the kitchen into the center of the house was also a problem. Moreover, the undefined layout that suited its previous occupants was unworkable to the new owners. “We don’t entertain large groups,” the new lady of the house pointed out. “We wanted something more fitting to our lifestyle.”
The couple began a year-long retrofit to transform the vast space into an intimate home—without taking a single step backward in time. They turned to Cunningham | Quill Architects to reclaim traditional functions—living room, dining room, kitchen and library—without building walls. Principal architect Ralph Cunningham enlisted project architects Maria Casarella and Michael Day, along with Angela Yu as project designer. “It was a bowling alley space,” recalls Casarella of the original floor plan. The team drew on an array of architectural devices to re-establish order and still retain the open quality of the space.
The home’s interior was, and still is, anything but traditional. The architects devised cabinetry to shape views, with big open frames atop storage consoles. Ceilings were dropped slightly to create a sense of intimacy in the living and dining areas. Trim was installed over doorways to draw the eye upward. To unify spaces and add sophistication to plain woodwork, patterns were scored on walls, floating ceilings and doors.
Today, the interplay of ebonized wood, cream surfaces and white trim is as fresh and relaxed as the couple’s vintage Donghia chairs and collection of Mid-Century Modern classics. The serene ambience gives little hint of the scope of change. Windows on the long north wall were enlarged and are now adorned with chic rolling screens. Casarella also upgraded a series of hidden service spaces—a closet, a powder room and a butler’s pantry—along the home’s shared south wall. By encroaching on 12 inches of prime floor space, she realigned a powder room door (it no longer opens into the living room), tucked a gas fireplace into the living area and turned a closet off the dining room into an occasional bar and workstation.
The new cooking area is a sleek maple box, with emphasis on efficient storage. As for dismantling the oversized, professional-style kitchen with its seating area and fireplace, the owner reasons, “We didn’t need two dishwashers or a 48-inch fridge.”
Casarella attributes the success of the project to an observation she made about her clients: “They are architects at heart.” Years ago, the owners had experienced the power of architecture, having built a house from scratch with Washington architect Heather Cass. That light-filled, frankly contemporary retreat had floor-to-ceiling glass fronting the Potomac River. Three moves later, Cass directed the couple to Cunningham and Casarella—both former colleagues—for their latest project.
Casarella worked long distance on the design, receiving photos and furniture dimensions from the owners, who preferred to retain cherished pieces rather than jettison them. The dining room was calibrated to fit a rectangular glass-topped table from a house in Norfolk. The sofa in the library, to the right of the foyer, was reupholstered. The Donghia chairs date back to the Cass riverfront house. The bed and armoire were acquired for an Atlanta condominium. Surrounded by these familiar possessions, the owner explains, “It’s not like you’re in a totally new place.”
The remodeled house seamlessly blends indoors and out, making the interior seem far larger. The landscape team of Jay Graham and Sarah Trautvetter of Graham Landscape Architecture in Annapolis replaced a conventional wrought iron gate with an enclosure of dark-stained îpe, offsetting the panels to frame glimpses of a secret garden at the end of a lush passageway while still blocking views from the street. The garden itself is a composition of dark-stained îpe, slate and evergreens. A floating fence of horizontal boards echoes the interior partitions while also disguising a high brick boundary wall. The dark wood backdrop sets off a gleaming steel sculpture and a small, mirrored water wall, visible through double doors from the kitchen. A wood seating wall surrounds raised beds where a paper bark maple, masses of coral bells and a few boxwoods are taking root.
“We were playing off the interior,” says Jay Graham. “We borrowed ideas from inside. The garden became another room.”
Upstairs, Casarella continued the scoring of walls and doors to lend “comprehensive touches throughout the house.” The second level is essentially a master suite. An office enclosed by maple cabinetry has a lowered ceiling over the work area. A window wall admits daylight through an adjoining television room. The third floor serves as a guest suite, but the owner has taken the west-facing sitting room for a home office. Atop Mount Saint Alban, her choice makes perfect sense. “It has the best view in the house,” she says.
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Bob Narod is a photographer in Herndon, Virginia.
ARCHITECTURE: RALPH CUNNINGHAM, FAIA, principal in charge; MARIA CASARELLA, AIA, and MICHAEL DAY, AIA, LEED-AP, project architects; ANGELA YU, AIA, project designer, Cunningham | Quill Architects, Washington, DC. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: JAY GRAHAM, FASLA, and SARAH TRAUTVETTER, Graham Landscape Architecture, Annapolis, Maryland. CONTRACTOR: MACON CONSTRUCTION, Kensington, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home design and building/remodeling features. Wonderful visuals of custom homes and eco-friendly resources are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design and remodeling projects to life.
JULY/AUGUST 2011
When Suzie and Bob Hawkins find time to sit back and enjoy their new front porch, the designing couple can sip a cool drink and admire the rewards of living in one place for decades. The generous flagstone expanse shaded by white- blooming Natchez crape myrtles has timeless style. But the refined country look speaks of a new era. The porch is a defining element of the renovation of the couple's Bethesda, Maryland, home. They have transformed a classic two-story family residence into a sparkling retreat for empty nesters.
“It's what we always wanted to do,” says Suzie Hawkins, an interior designer.
With its backdrop of towering oaks, the site maintains the charms of old Bethesda. But a new cobblestone border along the drive hints at big changes inside and out. The one-time Dutch Colonial cottage has been enhanced with an addition and dressed up with elegant stonework. White-painted columns add a formal touch to the porch, which has become the new outdoor living room. Banks of French doors now open the interior to the outdoors, merging the design passions of the residents. Bob Hawkins, founder of Hawkins Signature Landscapes, calls the ambience "Nantucket meets the Hamptons,” but insists he's most at home in the Adirondacks. Overall, the style is crisp but casual.
This idyll took a lifetime of professional attention to achieve. Nearly three decades ago, the couple bought a 1919 cottage with young twins and a third child on the way. The sizable lot offered an insurance policy in that it could be subdivided. The downside: The house was in utter disrepair. Suzie remembers "raccoons living in the kitchen.” Bob recalls how his mother cried when she realized how much work they would need to do. House and garden were improved “piecemeal” for years as the couple raised a family.
By 1997, the children were on their own and Bob and Suzie were looking to downsize. They considered Annapolis, where their son had attended the Naval Academy. And yet, there was something in the familiar view—willowy Kashmir deodar cedars set off by white-blooming azaleas at the end of a verdant lawn—that called the couple home. They decided to apply their skills to redesigning the house.
After architect Devon Perkins tweaked their plans, the couple embarked on a 1,000-square-foot expansion and complete interior upgrade. They started construction in August 2008 and finished in time to sit on the porch during the summer of 2009.
The impact of the renovation is apparent from the street, where an arbor beckons visitors in. Adirondack chairs on the lawn recall Bob's college days in Ithaca, New York, where he studied horticulture at Cornell. Natural stone provides a unifying element outdoors. A new, permeable semicircular drive sports four stone pillars topped with planters overflowing with Breathless euphorbia, cordyline, sweet potato vine and Margarita, Ebony and lemon white lantana. The new wraparound porch is underpinned by a stone foundation, and the master suite's wing has a stone façade.
Bob credits Suzie with the preponderance of elegant white-blooming trees and shrubs. Casual flagstone pathways reflect Bob's love of the country. He has planted the walks with creeping mazus sporting masses of lavender blooms between the stones in spring. Just inside the arbor, White Dazzler impatiens put on a show.
The house acquired a foyer, a master suite with fireplace and vintage beamed ceiling, walk-in closets and a first-floor laundry room. Radiators were eliminated, windows enlarged and French doors installed. The dining room was sacrificed in favor of closets and a white marble master bath.
During an earlier renovation, rooms were sited to look out on patios and the lush backyard, where Australian tree ferns, Little Lantern ligularia and ginger enliven the view. This time, the master suite addition got its own focal point when Bob tucked a cascading water feature and patio off the bedroom. It is set off by plantings of Nellie Stevens holly, rhododendron, dwarf clump bamboo, dwarf Gumpo azaleas, English weeping yews, boxwood, nandina, Patriot hostas and Fanfare impatiens. The ensemble forms one of a series of garden vignettes intended to draw visitors around the house.
Consulting an architect produced two improvements on the original Hawkins design. By angling the new wing ever so slightly, the couple created a more interesting footprint, improving views and achieving a more integral relationship between the addition and the front garden. As for the old dining room, it disappeared without a whimper. “We never used it,” says Suzie. The family dines casually in the breakfast room overlooking the back garden. The kitchen and breakfast area were remodeled in 1997 and refreshed in the recent renovation.“The flooring is reclaimed marble with the wrong side up because we loved the patina of the large slabs but didn't want shiny,” says Suzie Hawkins.
Bob sleuthed for vintage lumber for ceiling beams in the master bedroom and family room and random-width reclaimed oak for flooring to achieve a vibe he calls "polished country.” A massive flagstone that had served as a picnic table from the early 1900s became a fireplace surround for Bob's enlarged study.“I feel like I left something of the original house," he says.
Bob didn't have to go far for stone. The house sits on a vein of white quartz, which supplied a third of the material. A Scranton, Pennsylvania, quarry provided the rest, in tones of tan and brown rather than typical Pennsylvania blues.
Suzie designed an alcove for the master bed and wainscoting for the walls. She used a palette of neutrals with natural fabrics and a few well-chosen antiques to create a low-key, sophisticated environment.
"We were always kind of relaxed,” she says. “I think you have to be who you are.” As she often tells clients, “You're the one who has to live there.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Allen Russ is a photographer with Hoachlander Davis Photography in Washington, DC.
RENOVATION ARCHITECT: DEVON PERKINS, AIA, LEED AP, Hickok Cole Architects, Washington, DC. INTERIOR DESIGN: SUZANNE HAWKINS, Suzanne Hawkins Interiors, Bethesda, Maryland. LANDSCAPE DESIGN: BOB HAWKINS, Hawkins Signature Landscapes, Bowie, Maryland. RENOVATION CONTRACTOR: POTOMAC VALLEY BUILDERS, Bethesda, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.
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The serenity of the pool terrace at dusk is a compliment to the interior designer, Kristin Peake, who chose a palette as soothing as the froth on a latte to complete a grand private garden in McLean. On a hot summer day, creamy draperies billow in the arches of the deliciously cool pool house loggia, a nod to the Old World elegance she imagined. But Peake is the first to acknowledge that success on this project required more than plump cushions and custom chaises or meticulous attention to the detail of ceramic tiles. Recasting this long, narrow backyard into a modern family paradise required a team of experts and a client who understood the value of a master plan.
“The client brought in the right people and let us do our jobs,” says Peake. “They started with an idea of how they wanted it. We were able to completely change their minds.”
For the past year, the clients and their three young children have made the most of their new Tudor-meets-Tuscany environment complete with an outdoor kitchen, hot tub, monumental fireplace and cascading fountain. A peek-a-boo wall provides an elegant arched backdrop for entertaining by the 18-by-36-foot swimming pool. The wall connects with a jewel of a pool house, where the family finds refuge with chic furnishings, a flat-screen TV, kitchenette, laundry and sleeping loft. Nature takes over beyond the garden wall where a formal lawn gives way to a flagstone path leading to a fire pit. There’s space for a professional-quality playground as well as individual cupboards to “garage” children’s cars.
The property is part of a developing lane of houses designed for sophisticated living. The owners were hoping to add a five-car garage and replace a builder-designed patio with a pool and pool house when they approached McHale Landscape Design in 2008. They quickly learned that the hidden dynamics of their site would challenge those ideas—and lead ultimately to a more enticing space. Phil Kelly, McHale’s chief operating officer, and landscape architect Anthony Cusat relayed the news: With setback requirements and an awkwardly placed septic system, it would require ingenuity just to fit in a pool. With help from a civil engineer and septic system designer, Kelly found the way forward. Cusat never wavered from his goal of creating a “destination” with features to entice children outdoors.
Architectural elements give the project the Tuscan flair that inspired Peake’s décor. The combination of local stone walls and imported Turkish travertine underfoot creates a courtyard-like enclosure, with the pool house as a focal point. To complete the pool house layout and interior, which offers a 22-foot-high coffered ceiling under the peaked roof, McHale called on architect Michael Nawrocki.
The pool house is designed to be breezy or toasty warm depending on the season, thanks to fold-back glass doors that open wall-to-wall on the loggia side. The building itself is substantial, with a full basement for storage and radiant heat under the Turkish travertine floor. Custom lighting by Holly Hunt hangs above plush furnishings, which Peake has upholstered in pale but practical indoor-outdoor chenilles and linens. A fireplace crackles in winter, below the flat screen television, which provides sports and entertainment on command. For the fireplace wall, Peake designed a ceramic tile surround with a custom upholstered frame to ensure that the flat screen would fit seamlessly into the tile work.
The kitchenette, with its nifty gleaming espresso machine, is served by a dark-stained teak table that expands to seat eight. A tall, narrow wine cooler is hidden in one of the ample built-ins that Peake designed to keep the multi-functional space neat. The bathroom opposite the laundry room is as sophisticated as the rest of the décor.
To the architect, the combination of details lifts this pool house above the routine. “Pool houses often seem more like largely open party spaces, which are much more closely related to the pool,” Nawrocki says. A bar is standard equipment, but the overall impact is “a place to hang out with a changing room. This is really getting a lot closer to a guest house, a year-round refuge."
Like Peake, Nawrocki credits the client and all the collaborators on the project and gives special kudos to Cusat, whose “masterstroke” was to site the pool house on a visual axis that allows the owners to gaze from the breakfast table across the pool deck, through the glass doors of the pool house and on to the garden beyond.
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Bob Narod is a photographer in Herndon, Virginia.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: ANTHONY CUSAT, McHale Landscape Design, Inc., McLean, Virginia. INTERIOR DESIGN: KRISTIN PEAKE, Kristin Peake Interiors, LLC, Rockville, Maryland. POOL HOUSE ARCHITECTURE: MICHAEL NAWROCKI, AIA, Nawrocki Architects, McLean, Virginia. CONTRACTOR: GILES GRIFFITHS, NICK DANGL, project manager, McHale Landscape Design, Inc.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs and landscape design ideas. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas, and outdoor spaces to life.
At their best, weekend retreats hold the promise of fantasy and escape. For a Washington couple, a spectacular site on the Severn River provided the perfect opportunity to break from the Colonial conventions of their weekday home in the nation’s capital. With the help of decorator Sandra Meyers and architect Chris Gretschel, the owners embarked on a design odyssey that would maximize views of the river near Annapolis while creating a welcoming refuge with deep roots in its woodsy setting. The result is a spacious home with the natural charms of an Arts and Crafts cottage. Tall poplars and hollies are visible through imaginatively placed transoms and peek-a-boo windows. Nature is present inside in expanses of wood and stone. But period décor stops short under the peaked ceiling: A glass-block skywalk zings through the upper reaches of the great room in a bolt of enlightened contemporary design. Like the weekend retreat, the walkway is a bridge to adventure.
“As you enter the house, you look out into the main space through wood columns, under the glass catwalk, then out beyond the windows to endless water,” says Meyers. “It’s magical.”
The owners acquired the property six years ago. As is typical of Chesapeake Bay watershed sites, their options were restrained by the footprint of an existing dwelling, which was removed. By adding a second story, the owners coaxed a 2,872-square-feet dwelling onto the site, with a kitchen and dining level under a 25-foot ceiling. A step-down living area opens to the Severn with a 23-foot-wide expanse of glass. A slate staircase leads upstairs to the glass bridge and three bedrooms. Near the front door, a library can double as a fourth bedroom. “By stacking bedrooms and connecting them with the bridge, we created a variety of ceiling heights and kept the house really open,” says Gretschel, formerly of Creaser/O’Brien Architects in DC and now in private practice.
Meyers, who had helped with the clients’ Washington home, arrived during the blueprint stage. She established a palette of natural materials, including stone veneer for dramatic accent walls in the dining and living areas, a cherry wood-paneled ceiling that warms up the extreme heights and intricate Frank Lloyd Wright-style windows, which cast inspired shadows on the stair wall. Mission-style oak woodwork and maple floors lend solidity and a sense of timelessness.
Meyers specified bold-patterned Roman shades throughout the house. She chose fabrics with natural designs, a nod to William Morris’s 19th-century motifs, but a departure from the small-scale patterns of the past. Fabric and wall colors hew to muted blues, sedate reds or shades of cream. The natural theme continues in copper and bronze light fixtures and in the glass tiles of a symbolic “waterfall” mosaic in the master bath. A mesmerizing quartz backsplash suggests a Japanese screen print of tree branches.
“It’s Arts and Crafts style with contemporary flair,” says Meyers, whose vision was to blend the experience of indoors and out. “The goal was to be very harmonious.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Photographer Gordon Beall is based in Bethesda, Maryland.
ARCHITECTURE: CHRIS GRETSCHEL, Creaser/O’Brien Architects, Washington, DC. INTERIOR DESIGN: SANDRA MEYERS, Sandra Meyers Design Studio, Rockville, Maryland. CONTRACTOR: Saddler Construction, Inc., Stevensville, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.
JULY/AUGUST 2010
Thursdays are decorator Brooke Steuart’s special day at her Delaware beach house, a sunny yellow castle overlooking sand and sea. Less than three hours’ drive from the family seat in Owings, Maryland, the six-year-old Bethany Beach getaway is psychologically worlds apart. Daily chores and cares recede quickly after a few minutes under an umbrella on the upper deck of the beach house.
Upon arrival, Steuart parks in one of the garages neatly disguised by archways at ground level. Four young children—Ruby, 10, Talmadge, 9, Reagan, 7, and Rivers, 6—scramble upstairs to their fourth-floor loft, where a captain’s walk offers a picture-perfect view of the waves. “The children get the best view of the ocean,” says Steuart, who has entertained 14 kids on a single weekend.
With the youngsters safely ensconced, Steuart has the rest of the airy dwelling to fuss over and prep for the day. On Fridays, the usual crowd of 15 to 20 guests arrives to fill the rooms and decks with activity and laughter. “We built the house to enjoy and embrace friends and family,” she says.
Steuart established her decorating business seven years ago and works out of a studio in Calvert County, where she grew up. At about the same time, she built the 4,500-square-foot beach house “from scratch.” Steuart knew exactly what she wanted and proceeded to design the house herself “from the inside out.”
“I wanted a breath of fresh air, relaxation, color, stimulation,” she says. “I wanted it to affect all your senses.” Beach colors ranging from light sand to taupe are enhanced by “a multitude of blue hues,” including walls painted a delectable shade of aqua that responds to the ambient daylight. “I want you to feel like you’re in the sky,” she says.
Furnishings lean to natural woven grasses and linens. Floors are mostly bare white oak. An occasional calibrated blast of orange breaks through the decorative calm. The master bedroom is painted chocolate brown on all four walls and periwinkle blue on the ceiling.
“I really embrace color,” Steuart says. “It makes you feel rejuvenated. In this sometimes gray world, you work hard, then you go there and can relax hard.”
The home’s levels are organized by function. The children’s loft on the fourth floor can sleep 10 under a big ceiling fan amid tropical posters in lacquered white frames. The third level is reserved for living and dining spaces under two grand peaks in the roof. The master bedroom and four guest rooms are arrayed beneath, with services and garage space on the ground level.
Broad decks extend the width of the house on the second and third floors, giving residents maximum appreciation of the setting, which is just a quick stroll down a sandy path to the shore.
It was important to Steuart that rooms would flow from one to another, a helpful quality when the residence was opened for the 2007 Coastal Library Bay Cottage Tour and close to 2,000 people walked through. She also wanted a clear visual line, so that whether a visitor is seated on the deck or going up the stairs, the view is carefully orchestrated for maximum impact.
“Each room has its own flavor,” she says, noting that the master bedroom has a gas fireplace tiled with mother of pearl and a mantel finished in silver leaf.
The centerpiece of the main living floor is a spacious family room with 12-foot ceilings, a fireplace and what Steuart refers to as her “conversation pit.” The pit is more like an alcove overlooking the ocean with club chairs to draw guests for morning coffee or games at night.
In the gourmet kitchen, where Steuart likes to turn out lamb chops and osso bucco, countertops are fashioned out of thick slabs of pressed 1.5-inch-thick sea glass with waves molded into the bottom. The surface looks precious, but Steuart doesn’t hesitate to serve up juice to her youngsters. “Children have to be around all the beautiful things as much as I do,” she says. “I want them to want all that when they’re older.”
The furnishings take their cue mostly from the environment, but there are surprises. Steuart favors hand-painted, artisan-crafted wood furniture from Brazil. The dining table, breakfast bar stools and bedroom suite come from the Roberta Schilling collection; it is one of many lines that Steuart carries in her studio.
The dining room is lighted by artful but restrained crystal chandeliers. “I try to mix elements,” says Steuart. “I think it’s lovely to feel grounded but to look up and see the sparkle—like the sparkle of the ocean.”
On almost any Thursday, Steuart can be found arranging fresh flowers in every room. Though quiet time is increasingly at a premium—Steuart now has clients in Bethany and nearby Rehoboth—relaxation has not been swept out to sea. “During the afternoon,” Steuart says, “we’re all out on the beach.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, is collaborating on a book about the landscape of the U.S. Capitol. Dan Mayers is a photographer based in New York City.
INTERIOR DESIGN: BROOKE STEUART, Brooke Steuart Interiors, Owings, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas to life.
MAY/JUNE 2010
Over two decades in their mist-gray weekend house in St. Michaels, Maryland, two generations of a Washington family have embraced the outdoors. Their Eastern Shore idyll can be measured in memories of nature—the day the deer swam by on Broad Creek; the year a hurricane whipped one long island into three just past the boat dock; the seasons when swans flocked by the dozens to this waterside paradise— all viewed from a simple patio.
“The view is everything to us,” says a grown daughter.
But for all the pleasures of their retreat, the owners finally were compelled to acknowledge two small discomforts that come with the privilege of living just 100 feet from the water’s edge: unrelenting sun and insects. A little more than a year ago, they decided to add a screened porch to gain more shade and keep unwelcome creatures at bay.
But where to build it? What seemed like a simple idea became a quandary: Putting an addition onto the living room would have blocked the view from a favorite bedroom. Building a free-standing structure beside the swimming pool would have put the porch too far from the house and distant from that incomparable view. “I didn’t know how to do it,” admits the wife.
Finally, architect Merle Thorpe of Washington, DC, resolved the issue by proposing to locate a screened-in great room at an undervalued corner of the house near the garage.
To call the 40-by-19-foot space a porch is to miss its grander qualities. The gracious 17-foot-high room, which extends off one end of the living room, effectively doubles the family’s panoramic access to the water. By letting the porch jut out beyond the existing house, Thorpe also created a dramatic new waterfront axis: From the outdoor room, the natural sightline follows the shoreline across the length of the property to specimen trees at its most distant point. The shift in perspective has given the family a dramatic new view as well as a three-season outdoor living room.
“We’re very slow learners,” the wife says with a laugh. “We should have found Merle 15 years ago.”
“Sometimes, it takes a while to ask the right questions,” Thorpe responds.
The architect, who has been designing homes on Maryland’s Eastern Shore since 1989, takes pride in understanding the interwoven factors of location, climate
and ecology. He envisioned the porch as a “dramatic screened extension of the house” with doors both to the living room and onto the lawn terrace.
Broad eaves provide protection from the elements while still allowing the space to be caressed by gentle rain and welcome breezes. A roof monitor with operable
windows adds light and additional air circulation. The space features a fully equipped corner kitchen with grill station as well as a grand brick fireplace to take the chill out of fall evenings. The generous floor plan allows ample space for dining and comfortable seating under exposed rafters, which are stained gray-green to show off the wood grain.
The porch’s minimal structure takes its cue from shipbuilding rather than contextual architecture: Masts were sunken into a sturdy foundation to achieve invisible strength. Between the slim columns, screened panels are barely visible, thanks to the use of black powder-coated stainless steel; their fine mesh prevents no-see-ums from getting through.
Architecturally, the rhythm of the porch columns is designed to echo the windows of the existing house, which the owners had gutted and remodeled two decades ago. To provide a seamless visual connection between house and porch, the interior woodwork was painted “house gray.”
The owners had hoped to gain more expansive space for outdoor cooking, which the entire family of a dozen adults enjoys. The gas grill, previously located near the driveway, caused people-jams around the chef, rather than on the patio. The former cooking station has been transformed into a generous formal entry leading to a screened six-by-16-foot breezeway. The new route brings visitors directly from the drive to the host at his grill, or to the welcoming sofa beside the Rumford-designed fireplace.
“This solved everything,” says the wife. The porch provides “a lovely kitchen to cook in” with pale yellow cabinets set on stainless-steel legs. The practical brick floor can be hosed down easily thanks to weep holes in the baseboards. All appliances are salt-tolerant and countertops are made of matte-finish Juparana granite.
The project took six months to complete, working with Dirck K. Bartlett of ILEX Construction. Only one tree was lost in the process. Roof runoff is collected in gravel channels and piped into a swale.
A bonus of the design is a small courtyard garden off the breezeway, where a pink-blooming crape myrtle and a mahonia shrub create a serene miniature landscape among fog-gray river rocks. In Thorpe’s eye, the project, like this tiny garden, “crystallizes what it’s all about on the Eastern Shore.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, is collaborating on a book about the landscape of the U.S. Capitol. Photographer Anne Gummerson is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs and landscape design ideas. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas, and outdoor spaces to life.
MAY/JUNE 2010
Over two decades in their mist-gray weekend house in St. Michaels, Maryland, two generations of a Washington family have embraced the outdoors. Their Eastern Shore idyll can be measured in memories of nature—the day the deer swam by on Broad Creek; the year a hurricane whipped one long island into three just past the boat dock; the seasons when swans flocked by the dozens to this waterside paradise— all viewed from a simple patio.
“The view is everything to us,” says a grown daughter.
But for all the pleasures of their retreat, the owners finally were compelled to acknowledge two small discomforts that come with the privilege of living just 100 feet from the water’s edge: unrelenting sun and insects. A little more than a year ago, they decided to add a screened porch to gain more shade and keep unwelcome creatures at bay.
But where to build it? What seemed like a simple idea became a quandary: Putting an addition onto the living room would have blocked the view from a favorite bedroom. Building a free-standing structure beside the swimming pool would have put the porch too far from the house and distant from that incomparable view. “I didn’t know how to do it,” admits the wife.
Finally, architect Merle Thorpe of Washington, DC, resolved the issue by proposing to locate a screened-in great room at an undervalued corner of the house near the garage.
To call the 40-by-19-foot space a porch is to miss its grander qualities. The gracious 17-foot-high room, which extends off one end of the living room, effectively doubles the family’s panoramic access to the water. By letting the porch jut out beyond the existing house, Thorpe also created a dramatic new waterfront axis: From the outdoor room, the natural sightline follows the shoreline across the length of the property to specimen trees at its most distant point. The shift in perspective has given the family a dramatic new view as well as a three-season outdoor living room.
“We’re very slow learners,” the wife says with a laugh. “We should have found Merle 15 years ago.”
“Sometimes, it takes a while to ask the right questions,” Thorpe responds.
The architect, who has been designing homes on Maryland’s Eastern Shore since 1989, takes pride in understanding the interwoven factors of location, climate
and ecology. He envisioned the porch as a “dramatic screened extension of the house” with doors both to the living room and onto the lawn terrace.
Broad eaves provide protection from the elements while still allowing the space to be caressed by gentle rain and welcome breezes. A roof monitor with operable
windows adds light and additional air circulation. The space features a fully equipped corner kitchen with grill station as well as a grand brick fireplace to take the chill out of fall evenings. The generous floor plan allows ample space for dining and comfortable seating under exposed rafters, which are stained gray-green to show off the wood grain.
The porch’s minimal structure takes its cue from shipbuilding rather than contextual architecture: Masts were sunken into a sturdy foundation to achieve invisible strength. Between the slim columns, screened panels are barely visible, thanks to the use of black powder-coated stainless steel; their fine mesh prevents no-see-ums from getting through.
Architecturally, the rhythm of the porch columns is designed to echo the windows of the existing house, which the owners had gutted and remodeled two decades ago. To provide a seamless visual connection between house and porch, the interior woodwork was painted “house gray.”
The owners had hoped to gain more expansive space for outdoor cooking, which the entire family of a dozen adults enjoys. The gas grill, previously located near the driveway, caused people-jams around the chef, rather than on the patio. The former cooking station has been transformed into a generous formal entry leading to a screened six-by-16-foot breezeway. The new route brings visitors directly from the drive to the host at his grill, or to the welcoming sofa beside the Rumford-designed fireplace.
“This solved everything,” says the wife. The porch provides “a lovely kitchen to cook in” with pale yellow cabinets set on stainless-steel legs. The practical brick floor can be hosed down easily thanks to weep holes in the baseboards. All appliances are salt-tolerant and countertops are made of matte-finish Juparana granite.
The project took six months to complete, working with Dirck K. Bartlett of ILEX Construction. Only one tree was lost in the process. Roof runoff is collected in gravel channels and piped into a swale.
A bonus of the design is a small courtyard garden off the breezeway, where a pink-blooming crape myrtle and a mahonia shrub create a serene miniature landscape among fog-gray river rocks. In Thorpe’s eye, the project, like this tiny garden, “crystallizes what it’s all about on the Eastern Shore.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, is collaborating on a book about the landscape of the U.S. Capitol. Photographer Anne Gummerson is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs and landscape design ideas. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas, and outdoor spaces to life.
MAY/JUNE 2010
Over two decades in their mist-gray weekend house in St. Michaels, Maryland, two generations of a Washington family have embraced the outdoors. Their Eastern Shore idyll can be measured in memories of nature—the day the deer swam by on Broad Creek; the year a hurricane whipped one long island into three just past the boat dock; the seasons when swans flocked by the dozens to this waterside paradise— all viewed from a simple patio.
“The view is everything to us,” says a grown daughter.
But for all the pleasures of their retreat, the owners finally were compelled to acknowledge two small discomforts that come with the privilege of living just 100 feet from the water’s edge: unrelenting sun and insects. A little more than a year ago, they decided to add a screened porch to gain more shade and keep unwelcome creatures at bay.
But where to build it? What seemed like a simple idea became a quandary: Putting an addition onto the living room would have blocked the view from a favorite bedroom. Building a free-standing structure beside the swimming pool would have put the porch too far from the house and distant from that incomparable view. “I didn’t know how to do it,” admits the wife.
Finally, architect Merle Thorpe of Washington, DC, resolved the issue by proposing to locate a screened-in great room at an undervalued corner of the house near the garage.
To call the 40-by-19-foot space a porch is to miss its grander qualities. The gracious 17-foot-high room, which extends off one end of the living room, effectively doubles the family’s panoramic access to the water. By letting the porch jut out beyond the existing house, Thorpe also created a dramatic new waterfront axis: From the outdoor room, the natural sightline follows the shoreline across the length of the property to specimen trees at its most distant point. The shift in perspective has given the family a dramatic new view as well as a three-season outdoor living room.
“We’re very slow learners,” the wife says with a laugh. “We should have found Merle 15 years ago.”
“Sometimes, it takes a while to ask the right questions,” Thorpe responds.
The architect, who has been designing homes on Maryland’s Eastern Shore since 1989, takes pride in understanding the interwoven factors of location, climate
and ecology. He envisioned the porch as a “dramatic screened extension of the house” with doors both to the living room and onto the lawn terrace.
Broad eaves provide protection from the elements while still allowing the space to be caressed by gentle rain and welcome breezes. A roof monitor with operable
windows adds light and additional air circulation. The space features a fully equipped corner kitchen with grill station as well as a grand brick fireplace to take the chill out of fall evenings. The generous floor plan allows ample space for dining and comfortable seating under exposed rafters, which are stained gray-green to show off the wood grain.
The porch’s minimal structure takes its cue from shipbuilding rather than contextual architecture: Masts were sunken into a sturdy foundation to achieve invisible strength. Between the slim columns, screened panels are barely visible, thanks to the use of black powder-coated stainless steel; their fine mesh prevents no-see-ums from getting through.
Architecturally, the rhythm of the porch columns is designed to echo the windows of the existing house, which the owners had gutted and remodeled two decades ago. To provide a seamless visual connection between house and porch, the interior woodwork was painted “house gray.”
The owners had hoped to gain more expansive space for outdoor cooking, which the entire family of a dozen adults enjoys. The gas grill, previously located near the driveway, caused people-jams around the chef, rather than on the patio. The former cooking station has been transformed into a generous formal entry leading to a screened six-by-16-foot breezeway. The new route brings visitors directly from the drive to the host at his grill, or to the welcoming sofa beside the Rumford-designed fireplace.
“This solved everything,” says the wife. The porch provides “a lovely kitchen to cook in” with pale yellow cabinets set on stainless-steel legs. The practical brick floor can be hosed down easily thanks to weep holes in the baseboards. All appliances are salt-tolerant and countertops are made of matte-finish Juparana granite.
The project took six months to complete, working with Dirck K. Bartlett of ILEX Construction. Only one tree was lost in the process. Roof runoff is collected in gravel channels and piped into a swale.
A bonus of the design is a small courtyard garden off the breezeway, where a pink-blooming crape myrtle and a mahonia shrub create a serene miniature landscape among fog-gray river rocks. In Thorpe’s eye, the project, like this tiny garden, “crystallizes what it’s all about on the Eastern Shore.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, is collaborating on a book about the landscape of the U.S. Capitol. Photographer Anne Gummerson is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
**Out of the array of interior design magazines, Home and Design magazine stands out as a primary idea source for luxury home designs and landscape design ideas. Wonderful visuals of inspired décor and lush landscapes are combined with expert advice to provide a fundamental reference point for bringing amazing home interior design ideas, and outdoor spaces to life.
In the afternoon sun, the rustic stone pavilions glow like two pots of honey flecked with cinnamon. Set beside a swimming pool and against a backdrop of evergreens, the warm hues of rough rock suggest a fantasy from Tuscany (her dream), or a mountain retreat in the American West (his ideal). The genius of this Potomac landscape is that the timeless materials and iconic forms free the imagination to choose whichever dreamscape suits the mood.
And dreamscape it is, now that two properties have been joined into one seamless family playground with a boulder-strewn spa and waterfall thundering toward a Zen-like fishpond in the lower quadrant of the annexed lot.
The owners—an attorney, his wife and their two sons—waited six years to acquire the property next door, a corner site that has more than doubled their half acre. The project took three years and required a skilled design team to manipulate the land and replace the neighbors’ vintage rambler, tennis court and kidney-shaped swimming pool with features for an active family and their friends. Anne Decker of Rill & Decker Architects called on landscape architect Lila Fendrick to tame the site, now supported by a large stone retaining wall.
“The initial idea was a pool and gardens,” the wife says. “The plans got a little more sophisticated on the way.”
The wish list expanded to include a guesthouse, a mahogany-roofed dining terrace, an outdoor grilling area with pebble mosaic floor, an art studio, a spa bath, a three-car garage, a custom-made English greenhouse, a smoking circle for cigar aficionados and plenty of native habitat to attract wild creatures. The owners’ house also needed remodeling to create an opening to the new garden. By the time the design team was done, vegetable, herb and flower gardens, perennial borders and a canopy of hydrangeas had been planted, along with a personal woodland at each chaise longue, where “Forest Pansy” redbud trees align in cast stone urns.
Decker established a classical axis between the house and pool complex to create an illusion of depth, and Fendrick adjusted the topography to get the right sight lines from the house, which sits more than five feet below the terrace. “You want to feel like you are entering another world,” says Decker.
Stone became the defining feature of the architecture, interior design and landscape. Instinctively inspired by the family’s Sun Valley vacation home, the wife rejected the idea of building with the cool hues of regional bluestone. She searched all the way to Utah to find the warmer Mountain Valley quartzite/sandstone for the three-inch-thick pool deck, spa and parts of the terrace. Decker designed the pavilions and stone columns with a split Western Maryland stone veneer. Fendrick used local Carderock in a grand lawn-and-boulder staircase that ascends from the house.
The 42-by-18-foot pool is the heart of the generous garden. Near the diving board, the lawn is strewn with boulders, as if giants had emptied their pockets of pebbles. “It’s every kid’s dream to have a pool,” says the elder son, a teenager, who is as passionate about harvesting star fruit as he is about counting the “hundreds” of hummingbirds attracted by native trees and vines.
Accessible but not visible from the pool are the spa and waterfall. The water feature is a six-stage event in which water cascades over a submerged stone bench, massaging the shoulders of those bold enough to sit there. The torrents then tumble around a tiled spa and swirl into a lower rock pool. An immense stone slab bridges the water at that point, disguising a wall that separates the calm fishpond from the roiling waters.
Decker chose to divide shelter elements between two matching pavilions, rather than to saddle the garden with a monumental structure. The 24-by-44-foot guest pavilion, which is faced with stone outside and in, has a 12-foot mahogany ceiling and nine-foot-tall mahogany-framed French doors opening to the dining terrace.
Interior designer Skip Sroka of Sroka Design, who decorated the owners’ Potomac house and Sun Valley retreat, was called on to design the pavilion interiors. In the guesthouse, Sroka combined custom and designer furnishings and created leather pocket doors hung with barn-door hardware to hide a large screen TV used on game days. Donghia chairs and lighting by Holly Hunt are joined by an acrylic table by artist Eric Brand of Los Angeles; its top mimics the rings of a tree stump. Sroka kept the palette neutral. “You can only have one diva singing in the room at one time,” says Sroka. “It’s the architecture.”
However quiet the ecru upholstery, a Japanese maple outside the window makes a bold statement with coppery red fall foliage. It is one of a series of discoveries to be savored on a stroll through Fendrick’s landscape. Big, open, dramatic spaces alternate with small, secret places, such as a seating alcove sheltered by a canopy of “Tardiva” Hydrangeas. A clearing intended for a fire pit is framed by four Yellowwood trees and encircled by American Boxwoods. The greenhouse will nurture Meyer lemon and orange trees through winter. An herb enclave complements the outdoor grilling area, where hummingbird vines twine around classical garden pyramids. Elsewhere, native and non-native grasses are threaded between clumps of Summersweet, Inkberry, Winterberry, Sourwood and Iteas, with hardy Geraniums at the front of the border and tall white Persicarias at the rear.
“The goal was to create a very textured palette with a range of materials,” Fendrick says. She was also concerned about “how you move through the space.”
Fendrick left room for the owners to add plantings over time, filling spots among the native blueberries, ornamental grasses, Sweetbay Magnolias and Dogwoods. The site benefited from existing pines and hollies, but rapid-growing non-native species such as Green Giant arborvitae and Cryptomeria were added to increase privacy quickly.
A row of Lacebark Elms marks the “threshold” of the new landscape and the borderline of the original property. Fendrick explains that the idea was to “create an opening in a green wall of plants through which one would enter to get to the enchanted play space.” Viburnums, Laurels, Boxwoods and Chamaecyparis were planted under the elms to create a lush gateway.
“The trees will close in on the old house,” says Decker. “You won’t know you’re in a suburban environment anymore.”
Linda Hales, former design critic at The Washington Post, writes about architecture and design. Kenneth M. Wyner is a photographer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.
ARCHITECTURE: Anne Decker, AIA, partner in charge, and Richard Rossi, designer, Rill & Decker Architects, Bethesda, Maryland. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE: Lila Fendrick, Lila Fendrick Landscape Architecture & Garden Design, Chevy Chase, Maryland. INTERIOR DESIGN: Skip Sroka, ASID, and Brian VanFleet, Sroka Design, Bethesda, Maryland. CONTRACTOR: Sandy Spring Builders, Bethesda, Maryland.
MAY/JUNE 2009 | PHOTOGRAPHY BY SID TABAK
Living “green” is more than a design decision for Jeff and Alice Speck. It’s a commitment to the joys of the urban mix. From their striking triangular townhouse, which Jeff conceived and completed just before their baby Milo was born, the couple surveys rush hour on Florida Avenue, a short walk from the U Street corridor. The point of their house is architecture, a subject that engages both Specks. Plenty of sustainable features are embedded in the design—a solar-powered hot water heater, radiant heat in the bamboo floors and dual-flush toilets, to name a few. But the couple rests comfortably on their Marimekko cushions because they are not contributing to the carbon footprint of Washington traffic. They don’t own a car.
“The number-one green thing you can do is live in the city,” says Speck, a city planner with a passion for walkable communities. He believes his house “is twice as green” because of its location. “Even an earth berm with photovoltaic cells and a green roof on a biodegradable house at the end of a long road” would be less sustainable if the owners had to drive everywhere, he says.
The number-two green choice the Specks made was to build small. The footprint is ultra-compact, though window walls and select furnishings make the three-story structure feel more spacious than its 1,500 square feet. The residence measures 500 square feet per floor. Levels are linked by a sculptural steel staircase that descends with the metaphoric power of a mountain stream. The mass of black metal appears to rush from bedrooms past the kitchen to Speck’s office and on to the basement service level. There are dramatic vistas of the stairs from the kitchen and office.
Small is greener, because less material is consumed. But there is more courage than altruism in the design. The site restricted the home’s size, but the Specks had to have their tiny triangle.
A former design director of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jeff Speck ardently wished to live on a site that resonated with the history of Washington. Triangular “flatiron” lots date from Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the capital.
Alice Speck, a student of art history, understood the power of L’Enfant and was game, even if it meant fitting rooms in spaces that narrow to the width of a brick. So, Jeff, who has a masters in architecture, worked out a design with a friend, architect Brie Husted. An architectural model shows how Speck hit on the idea of “dropping a rectangle onto the triangle”—cantilevering two floors over city space.
Authorities agreed, and today, delightful glass-walled balconies and window seats overhang the setback line, and a 12-by-12-foot living room engages in a sophisticated dialogue with the kitchen, where black cabinets and black-stained concrete counters coordinate with the stairs and black leather banquettes.
The top floor contains two bedrooms linked by a bathroom. A triangular glass balcony offers a view of the Washington Monument.
There are no pointed rooms. The tip of the triangle is occupied by a wood-burning fireplace on one floor and closet space on the others. “It’s better to look at than to be in,” Speck says.
On 10th Street, the Specks enjoy a patio garden, where Alice nurtures herbs and vegetables in season. Across Florida Avenue, the land rises where an escarpment marks the natural boundary of L’Enfant’s Washington. The view is made for a history-minded urban family.
Linda Hales, former design critic for The Washington Post, is a contributing editor to Architect magazine. Photographer Sid Tabak is based in Washington, DC.
Living “green” is more than a design decision for Jeff and Alice Speck. It’s a commitment to the joys of the urban mix. From their striking triangular townhouse, which Jeff conceived and completed just before their baby Milo was born, the couple surveys rush hour on Florida Avenue, a short walk from the U Street corridor. The point of their house is architecture, a subject that engages both Specks. Plenty of sustainable features are embedded in the design—a solar-powered hot water heater, radiant heat in the bamboo floors and dual-flush toilets, to name a few. But the couple rests comfortably on their Marimekko cushions because they are not contributing to the carbon footprint of Washington traffic. They don’t own a car.
“The number-one green thing you can do is live in the city,” says Speck, a city planner with a passion for walkable communities. He believes his house “is twice as green” because of its location. “Even an earth berm with photovoltaic cells and a green roof on a biodegradable house at the end of a long road” would be less sustainable if the owners had to drive everywhere, he says.
The number-two green choice the Specks made was to build small. The footprint is ultra-compact, though window walls and select furnishings make the three-story structure feel more spacious than its 1,500 square feet. The residence measures 500 square feet per floor. Levels are linked by a sculptural steel staircase that descends with the metaphoric power of a mountain stream. The mass of black metal appears to rush from bedrooms past the kitchen to Speck’s office and on to the basement service level. There are dramatic vistas of the stairs from the kitchen and office.
Small is greener, because less material is consumed. But there is more courage than altruism in the design. The site restricted the home’s size, but the Specks had to have their tiny triangle.
A former design director of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jeff Speck ardently wished to live on a site that resonated with the history of Washington. Triangular “flatiron” lots date from Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the capital.
Alice Speck, a student of art history, understood the power of L’Enfant and was game, even if it meant fitting rooms in spaces that narrow to the width of a brick. So, Jeff, who has a masters in architecture, worked out a design with a friend, architect Brie Husted. An architectural model shows how Speck hit on the idea of “dropping a rectangle onto the triangle”—cantilevering two floors over city space.
Authorities agreed, and today, delightful glass-walled balconies and window seats overhang the setback line, and a 12-by-12-foot living room engages in a sophisticated dialogue with the kitchen, where black cabinets and black-stained concrete counters coordinate with the stairs and black leather banquettes.
The top floor contains two bedrooms linked by a bathroom. A triangular glass balcony offers a view of the Washington Monument.
There are no pointed rooms. The tip of the triangle is occupied by a wood-burning fireplace on one floor and closet space on the others. “It’s better to look at than to be in,” Speck says.
On 10th Street, the Specks enjoy a patio garden, where Alice nurtures herbs and vegetables in season. Across Florida Avenue, the land rises where an escarpment marks the natural boundary of L’Enfant’s Washington. The view is made for a history-minded urban family.
Linda Hales, former design critic for The Washington Post, is a contributing editor to Architect magazine. Photographer Sid Tabak is based in Washington, DC.
Interior designer Mary Douglas Drysdale made use of angled walls, recesses and dropped ceilings to display her clients’ powerful collection. A bold black, brown and blue work called Lullaby by Sean Scully dominates the largest wall of the living room.
At the home of Florence and Marvin Gerstin, art dominates the visual conversation.
From the entryway of their Chevy Chase apartment to the master bedroom, the longtime collectors have furnished their home with a short course in prized contemporary paintings, sculpture, photography and ceramics.
Pop Art stars in the kitchen, with Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Girl in Mirror, one in a series of six made in enamel on steel. It was the 1960s explosion of comic book art that first seduced the couple into collecting. But the Gerstins didn’t stop at Lichtenstein. An installation of Turner Prize-winner Tony Cragg’s green plastic junk—assorted broken plates and bottles—is velcroed onto another kitchen wall. Counters and stovetop play host to surreal ceramics, including a silvery saucepot filled with burned peas. “I just like fun things,” Florence Gerstin explains, leading a tour on a sunny fall morning.
Her husband, Marvin, a retired advertising executive, was on his way to the office when a visitor arrived. He paused long enough to show off his two stunning photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, which lurk in a concrete-walled powder room. The point is not to shock, he says. The photographs are there “because they look good.”
The Gerstin apartment looks good, too. The couple moved into the three-bedroom unit shortly after the building was finished in 1988. Their interior designer, Mary Douglas Drysdale, created a timeless envelope of pale wood and stone floors, soft white walls with custom built-ins and plenty of architectural lighting to enhance small-scale ceramics and the large-scale figurative bronze sculpture by Joel Shapiro, which seems to point the way to the study.
Marvin Gerstin points out that “the positions for the major pieces were determined before the apartment was completed…Mary Drysdale designed around the collection.” That meant creating walls big enough for the larger works, cutting doorways where none existed and building an eight-inch alcove to keep a wall-size painting “from protruding into a traffic lane.”
Furnishings have changed little over the years. The dining table was custom-designed for the space, which includes a minimalist striped sculpture by Anne Truitt. A set of 1960s-era Warren Platner wire stools and table from Knoll in the living room and a Hans Wegner chair in the guest room reflect the couple’s continuing taste for modernism and determination not to upstage the art. “We changed furniture every five years, antiques, English,” Florence Gerstin recalls of their previous life in a Bethesda house. “When we got to modern, we found it was the easiest to live with.”
The couple’s home acquires meaning not from the white-on-white décor, but from the often edgy paintings and bold sculpture, which provoke endless conversation. Marvin Gerstin points out that the careful placement of the art keeps the paintings from fighting one another. “They talk to each other just as artists do,” he says.
A bold black, brown and blue work by Sean Scully dominates the largest wall of the living room. It’s called Lullaby, and Florence Gerstin explains how the artist added a panel of pink bars as a memorial to his child, who died. A black-and-white abstract by Richard Artschwager is not an electric socket, she explains, but a landscape of clouds over sand and the ocean. The orange and yellow Robert Mangold from 1984, which glows on an angled wall overlooking the sitting area, is from the “Four Color Frame Painting” series. It creates an illusionistic window on the world of art, a witty retort in a room bounded by a wall of windows onto the real world.
“We waited a long time. We wanted one of this series,” says Florence Gerstin.
She credits her husband for the motivation to collect. He had dreamed of being an artist as a young man. After they married at the age of 19, he worried that he would never be a Picasso, she says, and so he turned to more lucrative pursuits. Over six decades, while raising children, he was successful enough to fill the family’s world with the Picassos of their own era.
At the height of their collecting years, the couple would travel to New York twice a month to discover emerging artists. They would monitor a candidate for a year or more before acquiring an early work. They paid a mere $1,200 for the Lichtenstein in the kitchen.
“My husband has a wonderful eye,” Florence Gerstin says. “We never bought paintings to match the sofa.”
Photographs taken after the couple settled in, but not published, show how the collection of art has evolved, with prominent pieces coming and going as the collectors refined their tastes, ran out of wall space or yielded to the entreaties of local institutions. An Alfred Jensen work on the mystery of numbers, left to the Gerstins in the Danish painter’s estate after their visit to his studio in New Jersey, has always hung in the dining room. A Warhol and two other Lichtensteins are gone, along with Jane Kaufman’s shimmering orange 6pm and Mary Hillman’s crimson Ties in My Closet. Both women’s early 1970s paintings have been given to American University.
“Focus was something that had to come into play,” says Drysdale, “trying to balance these enormous palettes of intensity. It [the interior plan] really needed to be a container for this great collection. It needed not to compete. I hope that we achieved that.”
Today, a construction by William Christenberry sits quietly on a pedestal in the hall. A Josef Stalin portrait watches over the bathtub. A Doberman sculpture stands guard on the balcony. No wall is left unadorned.
The master bedroom has long been the setting for the couple’s boldest choices. A marble chair by sculptor Scott Burton was almost too heavy to be supported by the floor, but it has withstood a generation of Gerstin grandchildren leaping from the top level to the bed. Windows wrap the bedroom, leaving just enough wall space for a 1985 diptych of deer by David True, called Forward, Upward, Round, which hung there until it was gifted to the Hirshhorn in the 1990s.
The Gerstins filled that wall with an early Elizabeth Murray, an artist who brought cartoon forms back to abstract art. Her massive construction of four panels, with slashes of red, swirls of blue and bursts of yellow, brings the collection full circle. (It was borrowed for a 2005 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.) A second Murray, called Stay Awake, hangs like a sculpture on an adjacent wall. The monumental three-dimensional work started out as a coffee cup, but became a “gland in the body,” Florence Gerstin says. She does not find the size or the subject matter intimidating to sleep with.
“When I wake up in the morning, I see Murray,” she explains. “I love it.” The couple’s latest acquisition was Philip Guston’s Poised, a large and disturbing still-life from 1978, in which the Canadian-American artist’s symbols—trash cans, cans of paint, dangling cigarettes, shoes—come together in one canvas. “He was highly critical of society and the world around him,” Marvin Gerstin observes, adding that in this case, the artist was “poised” to do something.
Collecting requires courage. Marvin Gerstin served on the board of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1989, when the cancellation of a Mapplethorpe exhibition caused a ruckus at the institution. Gerstin argued in favor of going on with the show, but more timidminds prevailed. If Gerstin’s private Mapplethorpe show treads the line between art and pornography, for those who need to take sides, the owner says simply, “I think they’re beautiful.”
The designer kept paths of circulation open around the furnishings to leave as much wall space as possible for display. Careful thought went into the placement of every piece. “In a well-curated space, you don’t see the art work all at once,” says Drysdale. “You turn a corner and see something new.” A black-and-white abstract by Richard Artschwager depicts a landscape of clouds over sand and the ocean. The orange and yellow Robert Mangold from 1984, which glows on an angled wall overlooking the sitting area, is from the “Four Color Frame Painting” series. It creates an illusionistic window on the world of art.
The Gerstin children don’t share their parents’ passion for collecting, though they have favorite works, their mother says. Auctioneers phone regularly, and museums have let the couple know of their interest in particular works, especially the earliest work by Murray.
“We’re not ready to give it up,” says Florence Gerstin. There are days when the collecting urge strikes Marvin Gerstin anew, and he expresses the desire to get rid of everything and start over, but his partner says firmly, “I discourage him.” They are both clearly content with the company they keep. “I think your home, everything in it, becomes your friend,” she says. “The bed. The chairs.” And above all, the art.
Linda Hales, an editor at The Washington Post, writes frequently on design. Photographer Maxwell MacKenzie is based in Washington, DC.
A geometric painting by Harvey Quaytman hangs near the entry to the dining room.
