Eleanor Niermann’s world is filled with memories of her parents’ boundless talent for creating beautiful furnishings. The Maryland company they founded in 1978—maker of elegant, handcrafted furniture, lighting and accessories sold to the trade only—has literally formed the fabric of her life. As a teenager, she acid-washed metal beads to create a patina for the Niermann Weeks Iron & Crystal Chandelier, deemed an “iconic 1970s design” 30 years later by Interior Design. When successive models of Joe Niermann’s first coffee table sold to designers right out of the family’s living room, she noted its changing dimensions because she had to adjust her position while watching TV. In fact, observing her father parlay his knowledge of antique restoration into the creation of new pieces for their growing furnishings business helped mold who she is today. Small wonder Eleanor has furnished the Eastport house she built across Spa Creek from Annapolis with so many beautiful prototypes from her life and family business.
“See my model of a 17th-century Southern Maryland brick manor house under the console in the study?” Niermann asks during a tour of her 3,100-square-foot, two-bedroom frame house. “I loved the ornamental brickwork so I built a model of it for a high school project.” Her father’s artwork hangs above the Frascati Console, which her mother and sister also own in different finishes. “My sister Claire and I helped my father create the Palissy Lantern,” Eleanor says, pointing to one hanging above a velvet-draped center table. “Claire has since designed a Palissy fixture for low ceilings as a result of living in a 1960s rancher. Traditionally, Niermann Weeks’s best designs originate from the ideas we get furnishing our own homes.”
Eleanor Niermann, half of the sister team now directing Niermann Weeks in Millersville, Maryland, took over a share of her mother, Eleanor McKay’s, marketing duties and her father’s design tasks in 2012 when they retired from the company. The fact that she had completed her own house in 2009 was a boon, as her new responsibilities send her to showrooms across the country promoting collections. When she returned home following the recent New York launch of designer Amanda Nisbet’s collaboration with Niermann Weeks, she was grateful for the refuge of her own personal oasis.
“I’ve actually lived in Eastport since 1996, so I’ve experienced how relaxed this sailors’ destination across the drawbridge from the Annapolis Yacht Club is,” she says. “I built my house because a lot came up for sale that promised unusual privacy.”
Despite her love of the laid-back, water-oriented lifestyle, Niermann drew from the formal symmetry of Annapolis’s 18th-century architecture when she and her father brainstormed her home’s design with Annapolis architect Gary Schwerzler. “I used a symmetrical center-hall plan with two ways out of every room,” she says. “I took liberties with the windows, bringing them all the way to the floor to get as much light in the house as possible.” She created modern contrast in the interior architecture with a staircase that fills the rear center hall with a luscious curve. “It’s made of steel with drywall and spackle filling in the base,” she says. “People seeing the house always comment on how contemporary the inside feels.”
Niermann’s choice of stark white walls and lightly bleached wide-plank pine flooring provides a neutral backdrop, or “canvas,” as she thinks of it, for her treasure trove of furnishings. “It’s second nature for me to stage my things because I do all the showroom displays for Niermann Weeks,” she observes. “But sometimes I think of my house as an excuse to gather furnishings I admire.”
The practice of assessing and promoting furnishings for their beauty originates with her father. “Dad can take a classic antique and hone it to an essential shape for a new piece that is exactly right for today’s living,” Niermann says. “My sister and I like to think we’re carrying on his talent.”
Niermann mixes periods and styles, combining antiques with more contemporary furnishings and pieces from prominent designers. In the living room, Amanda Nisbet’s Pike Occasional Table and Niermann’s own sunburst design for a fire screen make a bold contrast with the Niermann Weeks Tramezzo Screens, inspired by ancient Rome, in the windows. The frisson between worlds is exactly what she’s after and it may be that extra element she and her sister encourage with their new generation of the company’s offerings.
“I’m not into layering,” Niermann says. “I like making a statement.” For example, two Petunia Pendants from Amanda Nisbet’s spring collection deliver task lighting over a kitchen table/workspace. But with their funky, blue serrated petals and gold-leaf interiors, they slant the straightforward kitchen in a more personal and eccentric direction.
Though color has real presence in Niermann’s rooms, she tends to use it sparingly. The pink velvet-draped table in her study, for example, is there for sentimental reasons: “It’s the same one from the living room of a Beaux Arts house my parents rehabbed in Memphis when they were just starting their business,” she says. Her favorite celadon paint finish, most noticeable on the dining room chairs, floats through the house as verdigris furniture finishes, or on upholstery fabrics and ceramics. The color pay-off comes on the floor of the living room at the back of the house: Vibrant orange hues in a large antique Oushak rug explode in an intense complement to the room’s calming blues.
Creating beautiful furnishings for the home is a business for Niermann. But in her own home, it’s also a compulsion and a pleasure. Trained from childhood with a discerning eye, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Susan Stiles Dowell is a writer who lives in Monkton, Maryland. Photographer John Magor is based in Stafford, Virginia.
INTERIOR DESIGN: Eleanor Niermann, Niermann Weeks, Millersville, Maryland. ARCHITECTURE: Gary Schwerzler, Fourth Street Deign Studio, Annapolis, Maryland. CONTRACTOR: Steve Park, S.D. Park Builder, Annapolis, Maryland.
Baltimore designer Charlene Petersen and her New York City-bred client are young, vibrant—and certain about the trajectory they were on to meet and turn a newly minted condo in The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Inner Harbor, Baltimore into a glamorous pied-à-terre. The double unit—with water views of chic Harbor East and the iconic Domino Sugar plant—was one of two homes the client, a former Glamour photo editor, and her husband, CEO of a local software start-up, purchased when they moved to Baltimore. Serendipitously, Petersen’s name topped separate lists of interior design referrals the couple received for each project; they hired her to decorate the condo as well as their new home in Baltimore County.
During their first discussion about the abode—which they bought for its proximity to the husband’s downtown office—Petersen discovered how much she and the wife had in common. “We shared a passion for these downtown Ritz-Carlton Residences, where I lived for five years,” recalls Petersen, who got her start working for several local designers of national stature and now heads her own firm. “Terrific restaurants and entertainment venues are within walking distance, and there’s a young, friendly vibe here.” The two women shared what Petersen calls “a love of fresh, sophisticated interior design that’s not too formal or traditional, but still timeless.”
They were also of one mind about getting the project done quickly. “We started within a week of meeting in March,” says Petersen. “She was due to have her first child in June and wanted the work to be completely finished by August.”
The designer was unfazed by a schedule that required gutting and transforming two units into one completely furnished, 4,000-square-foot condo in six months. Fortunately, because of her familiarity with the property, Petersen remembers, “I had no learning curve. I had done my own condo here and knew the players in the construction process and the building allowances and limitations for a good design scheme.”
The apartment’s layout developed around its fabulous views. “We looked at the shell of the place after we tore down the dividing wall,” says Petersen. “A kitchen was already plumbed, but between it and the generous windows overlooking the harbor was plenty of living space.” The wife wanted to enjoy the flood of natural light during the day and the twinkling city views from the kitchen at night. So they opted for an open plan of interconnected living, dining, cooking and family areas. From the main entry, a corridor leads to private rooms—including three bedrooms, a study and three bathrooms—in the rear of the condo.
As the project progressed, Petersen’s eye for line and shine and her client’s New York sensibility infused glamour into the couple’s practical needs, with a new baby and future family on the way. “I presented my clients with two or three furnishing options complete with color choices that coordinated the basic requirements for lighting, plumbing and seating,” Petersen says. “Once their choice of plan was in place, I built up the decorative layers one at a time.” Her efficient approach set the stage for the fun to come.
Consistent throughout the condo is a pale color palette that magnifies the light and views. The hues morph to golden white in the family room area beside the kitchen, where traffic is highest and a purer white would suffer over time. In the more private bedrooms, she played with infusions of color on the walls and painted door frames pale gray “to give an entrance to each room.” Most significantly, Petersen set off the pale color scheme with strategically placed pieces of natural or grayed wood furniture. “Wood can anchor a neutral room with its color and texture,” she says.
Patterns superimposed on the condo’s overall medley of whites were the designer’s first layer in the décor. The patterns start small and subtle within the white-on-white upholstery and build to a theme of boldly interrelated geometrics on wall coverings, furniture inlay and accessories. The condo’s glamorous top note comes in a final layer of golden, silvered, metallic and mirrored finishes. The medley is carefully mixed and so integral to the overall effect that it doesn’t look contrived but is balanced and timeless. For the New York City-transplanted resident, the finished condo represents a shared vision and delivers a very special view of her newly adopted city below.
Writer Susan Stiles Dowell is based in Monkton, Maryland. Jamie Sentz is a photographer in Lititz, Pennsylvania.
INTERIOR DESIGN: CHARLENE PETERSEN, Cashmere Interior Design Studio, Brooklandville, Maryland. CONTRACTOR: RXR Realty, Uniondale, New York.
The farmhouse was a holdover from early in the last century, haphazardly altered over many years by eight different owners to fit the needs of their families. Countless changes to the original 1907 house had taken place, and along the way an open-plan wing had been added for space and contrast. Located on an acre and a quarter in the Village of St. Martin’s Additions in Chevy Chase, the old house was a stalwart survivor, even as real estate development extended beyond DC to surround it. However, in the 21st century, the dwelling entered its final metamorphosis when a couple who moved there in 1999 to start their own family finally decided to dismantle it and build something new.
The wife, a New Englander by birth who loves old things and prides herself on avoiding waste, hesitated to part with the original structure. “I grew up in an old house, so I had a hard time deciding to take down something authentic,“ she says. “But after a major renovation, the two parts of the house still didn’t work together. The rooms were unevenly heated, the dining room was tiny, the kitchen was far from the family room and we didn’t use the first floor of the modern addition.”
Rather than simply raze and discard the house, she and her husband, a private equity investment banker, opted to salvage parts of it—and of other houses as well—for their new home on the site. They composed a list of salvageable parts including a staircase and newel post, some yellow pine kitchen cabinets and leaded window frames; everything else would go to a salvage depot. “Patina is important to me,” says the wife. “You can’t reproduce on a new banister the look of wear that took a century to achieve on the original.”
United in their vision for a new old house, husband and wife brainstormed an architectural style that would suit the composition of parts they wanted and would also adapt to their lot and neighborhood. They hired George Myers of GTM Architects, interior designer Skip Sroka and builder Jim Gibson of Gibson Builders to realize their vision and create a home tailored to their family, which now includes three young children.
Myers, who founded his eponymous firm in 1989, is known for a commitment to hands-on client involvement. The program he developed for the couple was inspired by tear sheets they showed him. “The weathered-wood Shingle style of 1880s New England architecture was our inspiration,” Myers says, citing the work of Robert A. M. Stern and the stone walls and semi-circular arches of H. H. Richardson’s earlier prototypes. The meandering nature of Myers’s interior floor plan delivered the wide house dimensions and two staircases the couple wanted. The informal whimsy of its varied millwork, wainscoting, book nooks and window seats would absorb the iconoclastic salvaged materials. The style even sat well in the village-type locale. “We engineered a geometry of the new house’s parts that reflects the volumes of the neighboring houses,” says Myers. “When the village council changed the height restrictions on new construction during our planning stage, we could comfortably lower the roofline two feet.”
Marshaling the details for the plans took more than two years. During this time, Skip Sroka was allocating rooms and helping the couple visualize what they wanted beyond the basics of “a dining room that can seat eight” or “a huge mudroom at the back door for the kids’ gear.” By the time the demolition of the original house began, the designer had already finessed a coherent look for the entire project, integrating countless details and unusual salvage elements.
“This couple was on the same page about what they wanted,” says Sroka. “They told me, ‘Show us your ideas and give us at least three choices.’” In each room, he provided alternatives for everything from doorknobs and light fixtures to color palettes and upholstery fabrics. Final selections resonated with the informal Shingle style of the house and, wherever possible, accommodated a frequent refrain from the owners: “Wouldn’t it be great to find an old piece of salvage for this door, stairway or mirror?”
From a friend in New Hampshire, the wife received a dilapidated, white-painted barn door that Gibson Builders rehabilitated and Sroka’s faux painter overlaid with red paint. They hung it on its original track, where it slides between the kitchen and family room. Sroka tinkered to accommodate a range of salvaged items, using the style of the wainscoting, moldings and ceilings to bridge different looks. “The trick was to have a period reference for the introduced piece,” he explains. Sometimes the fit was easy; for instance, an old screen door pops up in the pantry, while green-painted doors from a Paris flea market occupy a proud place in the family room—a decorative element that is like adding unconventional art on a wall.
Sroka was painstaking in his efforts. In one instance, he ensured that the bathroom vanities would look aged by subtracting preservative stain from the paint finish. Carrara marble—a fixture in Shingle-style houses—had to be slightly cloudy to fit the period mood of the house. “I wanted new finishes to resonate with the worn patina of salvaged finishes,” he says. “We had to create the same feeling of durability and no fuss all through the house.”
Adorning this new old house with fresh colors, fabrics and wallpaper was the final step and a joy for Sroka. The age was right, and the rest came naturally. “My clients wanted an old house,” he says. “This was the next best thing.”
Author Susan Stiles Dowell resides in Baltimore. Photographer Timothy Bell splits his time between Washington and New York.
RENOVATION ARCHITECTURE: GEORGE MYERS, AIA, NCARB, GTM Architects, Bethesda, Maryland. INTERIOR DESIGN: SKIP SROKA, ASID, CID, Sroka Design Incorporated, Washington, DC. CONTRACTOR: JIM GIBSON, Gibson Builders, Washington, DC.
Rather than build a new house from scratch, a Baltimore couple asked architect Vince Greene and designer Jay Jenkins to update the traditional interiors of the house the two had created eight years earlier with a fresh, contemporary look. “The kitchen was a priority,” says Jenkins. “It was too dark, and needed a connection outside to feel more open and spacious for entertaining.”
The solution extended the family room to an outdoor terrace, enabling the design team to slide a new kitchen into an 18-by-30-foot area with sightlines to a forest glade. Ceiling supports reinforced the open space and facilitated the construction of a wall of windows overlooking the woods.
Jenkins worked with Pennsylvania-based Lyndon Heath Cabinetry to refashion sleek cabinets from the pre-existing ones, adding contemporary stainless-steel hardware. New venting technology allowed the hood placement high in the ceiling. Its stainless-steel surface is repeated in piggyback Wolf wall ovens the clients love for their ease of access. A retro-style pendant over the breakfast table is also stainless but lined in orange that echoes the popular Modernist hue in other parts of the room.
Jenkins bounced the windows’ dappled light off highly polished Glassos countertops. Nature gets another nod in flooring composed of rectangular blocks of rustic limestone that accentuate the room’s geometric shapes. “The contrasting round table and Klismos chairs are utterly clean and stripped down,” says the designer about the breakfast seating. “My clients wanted a transformation. We gave them a big wow factor for the entertaining they enjoy.”
ARCHITECTURE: VINCENT GREENE, AIA, Vincent Greene Architects, Baltimore, Maryland. KITCHEN + INTERIOR DESIGN: JAY JENKINS, Jenkins Baer Associates, Baltimore, Maryland.
See more Dream Kitchens:
Sleek + Contemporary
Nadia Subaran crafts a kitchen in DC
Clean, Classic Style
Bruce Wentworth remodels a Chevy Chase kitchen
Modern Meets Traditional
Marc Janecki overhauls an outdated Alexandria kitchen
Style + Efficiency
Hedy Shashaani ramps up functionality and storage space
MAY/JUNE 2012
To view before photos click here.
The big fieldstone house occupied a quiet Arlington side street, a stalwart reminder of a time when men went to work in suits and wives awaited their return holding cocktails. Designer Frank Babb Randolph met the current homeowners at a party and came over to survey their house after they suggested it might be a true test of his talent. The house needed Randolph’s reductive touch—a penchant for simplifying spaces that he honed years ago under his mentor, the great New York designer Billy Baldwin.
He started in the living room. “I substituted some of their heavy mahogany furniture for pale Swedish pieces, reupholstered others in lighter fabrics and replaced the carpet with a sisal rug,” he says. “That’s when [the owner] realized how much lighter everything looked and decided she wanted the same minimizing approach for the second floor.” In short order, Randolph had opened the rooms to light the couple never knew they had and adorned them with his signature pale, neutral palette. It was a cosmetic fix, though, and the designer knew in-depth work would be necessary to really transform the house.
The homeowners were empty nesters, long transplanted from their hometown of Richmond to the DC area where the husband works as a trial attorney. However, with three adult children descending frequently with their growing broods, he and his wife were looking to do more than refresh a home of 20 years. They didn’t shy away from the magnitude of work Randolph proposed, which included completely revising the bedrooms and baths upstairs. “You need an architect,” he told them. “We can open up the house, but let’s do it right by moving walls and stairs and whatever else we need for a better flow.”
The designer introduced the couple to Christian Zapatka, a Georgetown-based architect trained in the classical elements and proportions Randolph likes as a backdrop for his work. “Christian has an eye for the good bones often hidden in older houses and knows how to bring them out,” explains Randolph.
Touring the house from top to bottom, Zapatka reimagined an exterior architecture shed of its country-mouse demeanor. “I saw a smart center hall Colonial inside this Pennsylvania-style stone farmhouse,” he recalls. Some of his exterior changes, such as adding dormer windows and remodeling the front entry and side porch, use classically ennobling details and deliver more sunlight to formerly dark interiors. They achieve an update more appropriate to the home’s proximity to DC. “Basically,” says Zapatka, “we teamed up to distinguish the house.”
Inside, the architect reconfigured the second floor to create a spacious master suite, replacing a bath and a closet at either end of the hallway with windows that admit light to the whole upstairs. He also expanded the home’s usable space to the attic and basement, which were wasted on storage. Now, the attic houses an exercise room and the wife’s office—both well lit by two new dormers. Remodeling the basement revealed that the foundation had settled and its concrete-slab floor had become unstable. They lowered the floor 18 inches, exposing one long fieldstone foundation wall as a focal point to an informal family room.
Randolph and Zapatka brainstormed ways to ensure that the newly finished levels would feel accessible to the rest of the house. “We opened up three staircases that were enclosed or blocked by old, outmoded rooms,” says Zapatka. “This simplified the circulation and afforded views down halls and to windows throughout the house. We also lifted the height of the doorways and windows and added new, classically inspired millwork.”
The old screened porch off the living room got a new foundation and was transformed into a glass-enclosed space with a classical triglyph frieze along its cornice. Sunlight and a feeling of airiness broke through. And Randolph now had the broad canvas he needed for his pared-down, whitewashed style.
“I brought in a scrubbed look for the whole house,” he says. He applied a matte, off-white hue from Farrow & Ball to the walls and pickled the floors to create a bleached effect. The upholstery, in combinations of all-white tweeds, textures and subtle patterns, is easy on the eye and reflects light. “A pale room feels like it has more space and lets in more seating,” Randolph explains.
In the sunroom, the mix includes a shimmery silk-and-wool area rug. Randolph selected Swedish antiques from favorite sources Tone on Tone in Bethesda and David Bell in Georgetown; their distressed, whitewashed finishes add to the lustrous lightness that permeates the house. Floors in the breakfast area and dining room are bare. “A puzzle pattern of rugs would break up the flow from room to room,” Randolph observes. “I like the cleanness of furniture legs dancing on the pale wood.”
Randolph treated color as a captivating top note. “Colors pop on a neutral canvas,” he says. “I like bringing in select colors as accessories and then changing them out again as the mood suits.” Trays, bowls, and baskets hold decorative and useful objects, and pillows, artwork, flowers and fruit provide other pops of color. These elements add personality, moving in and out with a season, a party or a whim.
With those finishing touches, the house finally entered the 21st century. Zapatka’s bold presentation of classical architectural elements feels modern. Randolph’s sunlit interiors convinced the wife that she never wants curtains. “She likes seeing cleanly through the house,” says Randolph. “I call it living lighter.”
Susan Stiles Dowell is a writer in Baltimore. Photographer Geoffrey Hodgdon is based in Deale, Maryland.
RENOVATION ARCHITECTURE: CHRISTIAN ZAPATKA, AIA, FAAR; Christian Zapatka Architect, LLC; Washington, DC. INTERIOR DESIGN: FRANK BABB RANDOLPH, Frank Babb Randolph Interior Design; Washington, DC. RENOVATION CONTRACTOR: Mauck Zantzinger & Associates, Washington, DC.
**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.
