Double lots are rare in the hilly Cleveland Park neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C. And when Colleen Healey’s clients found one, they saw it as the ideal place to raise their family. The purchase represented a homecoming of sorts for the couple and their three children, who were settling down after living for six years in Japan—and in California before that. The lot held a large four-square house, built in 1917, that offered tired spaces typical of the period, most notably a landlocked kitchen. Moving it was the main reason for the gut remodel, although everything needed repair. “It hadn’t had a new owner in almost 50 years and needed a lot of upgrading,” says Colleen, AIA .
While the house is indeed a renovation, the resulting site concept is brand new. It includes a meadow that mediates between the refurbished house and a new garage/accessory building at the rear of the lot. This scheme met the clients’ request for an indoor-outdoor house, one that felt comfortable and had a natural vibe. In fact, an overgrown patch of mint and flowers inspired the interstitial green space that became the heart of the project. “We decided to create a bigger and better meadow between the main house and the accessory building we added,” Colleen says. “We started there and worked our way out in both directions.”
The architect is known for her work on D.C.’s fraying single-family dwellings, many of them possessing solid bones and appealing echoes of the past. She specializes in creative juxtapositions that tie old houses to their history in unexpected ways, while delivering modern amenities and more usable, light-filled spaces. In this case, the main gesture was to push the kitchen and dining area into a one-story extension at the back of the house.
Surgical interventions enhance flow-through on the first floor. Flanking the central foyer, two former sitting rooms were repurposed as a music room on the left and an office on the right. Colleen removed a hallway wall near the back of the first floor, replacing it with a curved plaster wall—a motif that appears throughout the renovation. That wall holds a walnut TV cabinet on the living room side (formerly the dining room), separating it from the stair hall. Behind the switchback stairway, a pantry, powder room, and mudroom replaced the original kitchen. These spaces circulate seamlessly into the 16-by-32-foot addition, where the kitchen and dining room segues into the garden through floor-to-ceiling glass doors, along with a screened porch overlooking a new pool.
“The big structural move was to put in a very large beam that goes across the back of house to open the living room to the addition,” Colleen says. “The addition is almost all open and has a full basement below.” Underpinned to give the existing section a higher ceiling, this underground space holds an in-law suite, gym, storage, and large playroom. Bedrooms are located on the top half of the house—the primary suite and two guest suites on the second floor, and four kids’ bedrooms on the attic-like third floor.
Shore Thing
Sectionally, the old and new interlock in the addition. Two small existing sleeping porches in the second-story guest rooms are embedded in the roof of the addition, which has a 10-foot ceiling. “The sleeping porches dig into that ceiling a bit,” Colleen says. “In order to keep them at the same level as the bedrooms, we devised a kitchen ceiling that allows them to float into the space they need, 8 or 9 inches. A sculpted ceiling covers the part that dips down.” Its rounded baffles echo the soft side curves of the original entryway and the former dining room, now living room, as well as a dining room light fixture the couple loved—one of the first pieces they purchased for the project. “The ceiling arches above the fixture and almost cradles it,” Colleen says. Acoustically, the baffles help to bounce sound around, along with light from two skylights.
As artistic as the solution appears, historic preservation codes required an unusually complicated execution. The double sleeping porches had rested on a dilapidated addition. Preserving their original structure, while sliding the new addition and basement under it, meant erecting a robust shoring system during demolition. “Steel was required for the long distance from the second floor down to the basement excavation,” says builder Eric Zuckerman. “It was a real challenge to get the steel system in place and still allow access for machines to get into the basement and do the underpinning. Most of that structure was temporary.” Adds Colleen: “It definitely could have been put back for less money and the same results.”
With its glass walls and treated pine framing, the kitchen/dining addition sits lightly against the house. Because of the long lead time, the Boffi kitchen cabinetry was ordered before construction began to keep the schedule on track. “Boffi created shop drawings and we built the addition to those shop drawings,” Eric says. “Being all glass, there was no room for error, and when you’re building onto a house over a hundred years old, everything has to be measured accurately and fit within a sixteenth of an inch.” Iridescent green clay tiles draw the eye, while the cabinet covering the refrigerator and wine cooler was plastered to disappear into a wall.
Accessed from the dining area through a wall of sliding glass, the screened porch extends the addition to the east. Its window divisions mirror the kitchen’s to create the sense of a single space, and its ipe floor is a tonal complement to the house’s wide-plank walnut floors.
The Lovely Bones
Glimpses of the original structure appear throughout the renovation. During demolition, the team discovered a double wall with a pocket door in the front hall outside the office. The wall skeleton facing the foyer was left exposed and a sliding glass pocket door inserted behind it. The glass was set into a locally fabricated raw steel frame, and its handle was made from wood salvaged during demolition. “The exposed wall is really spectacular,” Colleen says. “The original blocking was randomly placed, and they have little pieces of artwork their kids have drawn sitting on it. When you come in the front door, it gives you a sense of who they are and that they value this original craft and what this house was.”
New bifold doors between the office and living room complement that industrial flavor. They’re made of heavy, raw steel plate with random-height boards from the original house pieced along the bottom edges. “The doors act as the husband’s Zoom backdrop,” Colleen says. Across the hall, the music room combines soft edges with rustic elements. At the existing fireplace, a new curved plaster wall with wood detailing matches the living room’s curved media wall, and a big hearth stone was added from a local quarry.
Upstairs, the street-facing primary bedroom has a southern view of Washington National Cathedral. Fairly modest with an 8-foot ceiling, it nevertheless has elements of surprise. The crew pulled off the fireplace’s mantel and plastered surface, exposing its raw brick surface. “We loved the original rawness of it,” Colleen says. “It was never meant to be seen but it had character that you couldn’t recreate.” Pulling back part of the ceiling exposed the underside of the roof, allowing the fireplace to shoot up into it. A new roof window bounces sunlight onto the fireplace, and LEDs add low lights at night. Using bricks from the inside, the fire box was raised to improve the draw, and a new limestone hearth matches the bathroom floor.
Inspired by their years in Japan, the owners wanted woods that were warmer than the white oak many clients ask for these days. Their bathroom is wrapped in pine, paired with a square-tambour walnut vanity, echoing the downstairs palette. “The elegance comes from the wood rather than metal finishes,” Colleen says. “The limestone floor has natural divots, giving it an old-world feel. In Japan you sit on a stool with a bucket and wash before you get into the tub, which is seen as a relaxing nightly ritual.” Linen cabinets disappear into the wall, and the solid surface countertop incorporates a trash drop. “This primary suite is built almost like a ship because of how much we wanted to fit into that space,” she says, “while being intentional about the way you move through.”
Two more guest bedrooms, with those sleeping porch extensions, occupy the back half of the second floor. Entering the children’s domain, the third floor was left mostly intact except for opening the ceilings to the pitched roof height and adding skylights to banish the attic feeling. A new insulated art room with exposed rafters fills the bump-out above the second-floor porches.
Meadow Lark
The backyard is a brilliant synthesis of architecture and landscape biodiversity. A meandering garden fills the requisite 25-foot void between the addition and a two-level outbuilding along the back alley. Colleen worked with landscape designer Lynley Ogilvie to lay out the paths, which enter the garden from a shared driveway off a side street, and to incorporate a rock where the kids can sit. Cor-Ten steel edging defines gardens filled with vegetables and flowers, and a trellis on the garage/guest house wall holds honeysuckle vines.
Finished a few months after the house was completed, this accessory building contains the garage and a pool bath on the first level. An outdoor shower shares its structure with the white metal spiral stair up to a bedroom and bath, where a guest or two can spend the night. Given that this was a new building along an alley, the neighbors predictably pushed back. Colleen responded to their concerns with a steep, single-pitch roof and a dormer, giving it the appearance of a one-story structure with a dormer. Its symmetry, natural-looking materials, and soft gray metal roof harmonize with the addition.
Amidst this setting, Hidden Meadow is closer in spirit to a country house than many of its urban neighbors. “The materials are very natural and used in a relaxed way, for the most part,” Colleen says. “This is one of those projects where there aren’t any spaces taller than 10 feet, other than the pop-up in the primary bedroom.” Combined with the rich combination of materials, “it creates an intimacy that’s grounding because you’re always looking out and forward into adjacent space, rather than upward into a vacuous space.”
This historic four-square house is rooted in its context while artfully alluding to ideas the owners brought back from their travels. “They put a ton of work into it, and you get a good product that’s very unique when the client is invested in the process,” Colleen says. “We learned a lot from them about the different places they’d been. For me, it was a really rewarding project in that way.”
A large lot in Washington, D.C., provided fertile ground for a whole-house makeover and pocket meadow.
Curved walls unify the renovation, referencing the existing entryway’s soft edges.
The addition’s simple pine framing harmonizes with the new meadow and garage/guest house beyond.
A sculpted drop-down ceiling above the kitchen island hides the structure of the original second-story sleeping porches, which penetrates the addition’s 10-foot ceiling.
The existing stair leads up to two guest rooms and the primary bedroom, where the newly exposed fireplace brick rises through an opened ceiling.
A tamboured vanity in the primary bath echoes the subtle curves that appear as a theme throughout the house.
Trellised vines will soften the new garage/guest house, and the spiral stair incorporates an outdoor shower.
Continuous with the kitchen and dining area, a screened porch opens to the pool and backyard.
Hidden Meadow
Washington, D.C.
Architect: Colleen Healey, AIA, principal in charge; Blake Massie, design staff, Colleen Healey Architecture, Washington, D.C.
Builder: Zuckerman Builders, Bethesda, Maryland
Landscape designer: Lynley Ogilvie Landscape Design, McLean, Virginia
Structural engineer: George Norton, Norton Consulting Engineers, Clarksburg, Maryland
Civil engineer: CAS Engineering, Washington, D.C.
Audiovisual engineer: Powerhouse DC
Project size: 7,650 square feet
Site size: 0.3 acre
Photography: Jennifer Hughes Photography
Key Products
Cooking vent hood: Boffi
Cooktop: Miele
Cladding: Accoya and stucco
Dishwasher: Miele
Entry doors: Loewen Windows and Doors
Faucets: Crosswater London
HVAC system: Carrier
Interior lighting: Illuminations DC
Lighting control systems: Lutron
Ovens: Miele
Radiant heating: Schluter (kitchen and dining room)
Refrigerator: Miele
Roofing: Certainteed, Kynar
Sinks: Kohler, custom Corian
Skylights: Velux
Thermal and moisture barrier: Cedarbreather
Toilets: Toto
Ventilation: Panasonic
Window shading systems: Rockville Interiors
Windows: Windsor, Loewen
Wine refrigerator: Miele