A Touch of Glamour

He’s an attorney, she works in the media and eight years ago they were entertaining vague notions of moving from Alexandria to Washington. “We weren’t aggressively looking for a house,” she says, “I was bored one Sunday morning and was wandering around Logan Circle.” It was about 10 AM on that morning when a For Sale sign on a Victorian-era townhouse caught her eye. By 2:00 PM she was back with husband-in-tow and writing up a successful offer.

Although the house had already been updated, more was needed to imprint the new owner’s lifestyle on the grand dame property. “We like modern design but warm modern, not stark,” she says, “and we wanted to be patrons of the local shops.” The couple didn’t have to look very far to find Vastu, a contemporary furniture store on Fourteenth Street that also offers interior design service.

“They were original clients from when we first opened the store,” says Jason Claire, co-owner, “they stumbled in one day and we found out the house was only three blocks from the store.” Claire and Eric Kole, the other Vastu principal began divining how the couple wanted to combine the home’s old world charm with the modern lifestyle of it’s new owners.

“It always starts with a conversation,” says Claire, “we like to talk about functional spaces, and how they want to use the room.” Form follows function and the owners already had a vibe in mind. “We talked about old Hollywood glamour,” she says, “we talked about having a martini in the living room and being taken back to the 1920’s. Within twenty four hours of that conversation, Eric was back with sketches and fabric samples.”

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Victorian living room with a touch of glamour.

 

Crafty Bungalow

We first met the homeowner to inspect a degraded old group house in D.C.’s Palisades neighborhood. As a design/build firm that focuses on remodeling, we don’t usually recommend tearing down a home, but we dutifully wrote the proposal anyway with the bad news. Shortly after that, the homeowner bought the house and hired our firm to design a new home on the site.

Our customer had a pretty clear vision of what he wanted, a well designed, well constructed bungalow that would blend into the neighborhood. In addition to fidelity to the craftsman spirit and ideals, our client required the integration of sustainable design principles, energy efficiency and quality throughout. He also wanted to recreate the dimension and feel of his living/dining room in his Mount Pleasant home.

The homeowner’s initial request of 2400 square feet did not accommodate all the requirements he was looking for in his new house. At the completion of design, the project had expanded to 4500 square feet. Care was taken during the design phase to ensure that the home’s massing would fit in with the neighborhood and the bungalow aesthetic. Instead of going up, the home extends inconspicuously toward the rear of the lot.

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The front facade of new bungalow, built from scratch.

 

Basement Bonus Room

Talented architects, designers and photographers send me really cool story ideas that I cannot find a home for on a regular basis.  This has become more frustrating lately since many shelter mags went under during the recession.  For the past few years I’ve been publishing my older pieces on my Design POV site and up to now, 99% of the work that’s up there is mine.  But.  The creative cats at Wentworth sent me some awesome shots of a basement makeover that I shopped around but nobody was biting.  I know Bruce (who’s on this list) at Wentworth likes to write so I asked if they had a project write-up I could use to go with the pictures.  Turns out they did, so I used his words and the pictures to build a sweet little web page that links back to the Wentworth site. Check it out.

A place to live it up in a basement bonus room.