Alise O’Brien
Built in 1907, the house in the Central West End had the drawn-up grandeur of a dowager for whom things have always been just so—and must always remain just so.
The owners respectfully agreed. But they also had this thing called a life, and it included two small boys and a big dog, lots of entertaining, and a relaxed approach to the world. They agreed to do nothing drastic: They might enlarge a few bathrooms, but they would not capture a bedroom and divide the spoils into closet and giant bath. They’d keep the chilly marble powder room by the entry hall; it was gorgeous. But they’d add another near the kitchen, for ease. And they would need a kitchen. When they bought her, the dowager had stood empty for three years, and she did not have anything resembling a kitchen, just a third-floor facsimile and a gutted anticipatory space.
They put in a temporary kitchen, focused on other improvements, and spent a few years wheedling. Surely she wouldn’t object to the removal of that claustrophobic wall, so the kitchen could flow into a breakfast room and hearth room? And a few gracefully concealed state-of-the-art appliances would do no harm…
In the end, they won the house’s approval simply by selecting Brian Smith to do the renovation. He was a well-traveled chap with a bachelor’s degree in nuclear physics and a second bachelor’s in engineering, and— they raised their voices for this part—he had studied the history of English Baroque architecture at Oxford.
Mr. Smith had begun as a draftsman for Gregory Gunn in 1985 and was now president of Gunn & Smith, whose projects ranged from contemporary art museums to high-end, large-scale residential renovations. The kind that required shattering a room’s geometry and reconfiguring it—without erasing its structural integrity.
He started with the temporary kitchen.
“It was closed up solid, typically claustrophobic,” Mr. Smith recalls. Now, there are cabinets on three sides (some, like Trojan horses, concealing alien, beautiful appliances), but the old dividing wall is gone. And how did Mr. Smith replace the support it lent the second-floor fireplace? “Used steel beams. Carefully.”
The result is that you can stand in the kitchen and gaze out across a counter to the breakfast room, with a long, dark Christian Liaigre table and an altar light fixture in dark steel, suspending dozens of subtly, electronically lit cream candles of varying heights. Beyond the breakfast room, Mr. Smith added a hearth room, its focal point a white marble fireplace with a chrome-ribboned glass screen and zigzag andirons in polished white bronze. A flat-screen TV sits in a shallow recess above the fireplace, faced by two dense, soft easy chairs and an ottoman in a muted blend of tobacco and pale blue-green. Windows line the room.
“I love natural light,” Mr. Smith says, “and it’s such an experience to step from the darker central hall,” with its ornate wrought-iron door, chapel-like quartersawn oak staircase, banded ceiling, and gothic-arched paneling, “into this area just filled with light. They’re compatible spaces, but different experiences.”
When the family moved in, nearly all the walls were painted dark colors, lit by a few sconces here and there. Now the kitchen cabinetry’s pure white, and in its custom design, interior designer Arlene Lilie asked Classic Woodworking to imitate the dowager herself: tall and immaculate, almost severe, but with graceful, classical proportions. Then Ms. Lilie snuck on polished chrome hardware.
“Architecturally, we try to be sympathetic to the detailing in the existing house,” Mr. Smith says. “But there was nothing in the existing kitchen space that provided a template for the new kitchen—just the feel and the time period. So we used those very tall, narrow cabinets to give the room some height. I think it would have destroyed the room if these cabinets were low.”
The feel remains traditional, but with breeze and sunshine in the details and practicality in places where not even a dowager could object. “The idea was opening things up, so the house breathes and circulates,” Mr. Smith says. A hallway now runs from the kitchen to the front of the house (no more need for the servants’ quarters that quarantined the space), and the hall’s lined with big closets for the kids’ stuff. The renovated area “makes the whole house more livable,” says one of the owners. “We have lots of kids over, and they can eat in the kitchen and watch the football game, and our son can build Batman caves in there.”
Even grown-ups congregate in the kitchen. Once, unable to budge the guests at a formal fundraiser, the wife almost threw up her hands and served dinner in the breakfast room. Its proportions are just as classical: tall French doors and tall windows that swing open with the lightest tug on a polished chrome rod. At the touch of a button, shades descend with the slow drama of a theater curtain, making the evening private.
Phase I of the renovation was a terrace, pool, and cabana added in 2002. “It all started with a collapsed sewer line,” one of the owners says with a grin. Mr. Smith stared long and hard at the scalloped, stained-wood fence, a decklike railing in a completely different style, and lattice-covered casement windows. Then he replaced them with an elegant privacy fence, a stone patio, and a terraced brick wall with tall shrubs that hid the casement windows and drew the necessary line, no fussy railing needed. On the home’s back façade, a grimly imposing three-story wall of brick broken only by windows, Mr. Smith cantilevered a narrow ornamental ledge, supported by dove-colored brackets that matched the trim and the new privacy fence. “It fractured the façade and really gave the back of the house a human scale,” he says, pleased. The contractor he used, S.M. Wilson, normally does commercial work—but the scope was so large and the engineering so involved, those skills were requisite.
In Phase II, Mr. Smith replaced the dining-room windows with French doors; why stare out a window when you can step out onto a terrace? Originally, the room had two interior French doors, but one had been mysteriously sealed into a wall. Mr. Smith followed a hunch, removed the wall, found the opening, and had a door made to match the one that was intact. “Now it lines up, so there are these wonderful vistas,” he says happily. “There’s a French term for it: enfilade.”
The word’s not actually so pretty: it’s a military term indicating that a weapon can be fired straight down the longest axis—say, the length of a trench. But when Mr. Smith says enfilade, he’s talking sightlines, and his point is that you can gaze uninterrupted through the house. That kind of alignment brings clarity to the floor plan, he says—not to mention a sense of openness and flow. But nothing’s jarring, and only that one pesky wall has been removed.
“I like to do things that appear as if they’ve always been there,” Mr. Smith says. Similarly, Ms. Lilie describes her interior-design role as simply “freshening”—introducing a warm, pomegranate-red Turkish rug in the dining room, for example, instead of a plain neutral one. The red glows against the dull gold of updated damask chairs (matte, not shiny) and heavy dupioni silk draperies, bunchy as a ball gown and overlaid with sheers.
For the living room, more silk draperies draw attention to the rows of windows, brightening the room even on the gloomiest gray day. More light glows from a Flos globe lamp, a contemporary standing lamp, and a cloisonné gourd lamp, all carefully chosen to bring the room into the next century. Ms. Lilie had the coffee table custom-made with a pale limestone top to further lighten the room and placed a weathered, antique French farm table beneath a row of vividly contemporary Donald Baechler prints. “I like when you bring things in, so the room doesn’t look like everything is new and done from scratch,” she says. Her clients wanted help, not a superimposition of someone else’s aesthetic, and they wanted to be true to the lines of the house, but also true to the way they lived.
The dowager acceded to their wishes.
