David Jameson, FAIA, has a knack for the conceptual. Consider the names he’s given some of his residential projects: Bar Code House, BlackWhite Residence, PushPull, Jigsaw, Warp and Weft. The most recent example is the Hull House, so named for its vaulted interior in which living spaces unspool under rakish folded rooflines. Jameson took as his starting point the gabled roofs of older houses in this upscale neighborhood near Alexandria’s Old Town district, just across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital. But he employed the gables in a new way, bending them into copper-covered shapes inspired by origami and supported by exposed, splayed steel piping.
From the front, the house appears as a craggy building behind a high, stone-clad service wall; from the back it’s all glass, opening to a patio and pool. The result is an alluring combination of the industrial and the glamorous, a glass house and a garrison near a busy street.
Although the neighborhood dates back to the turn of the last century, inventive modern houses are cropping up in this enclave of urban professionals. In fact, aesthetically, the clients—a couple with two kids—gave David virtually free rein on the design. “They said, we just want to build a modern house, but we’ll let you create what it is,” he says. David took a page from their former house nearby—a single-story bungalow with high ceilings. They had opened up the kitchen, living and dining area, and bedrooms, blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces. “To me it was an interesting opportunity,” David says. “A lot of clients wouldn’t want glass, and to be exposed from outside the bedrooms. In this project we celebrated the same thing they had done in the bungalow renovation and allowed light to filter between various bedrooms and the living area of the house.”
Shape Shifting
To say that David took this idea up a notch is an understatement. Diagrammatically, he describes the design as a simple, folded origami tent draped over three service areas and circled by glass. The bar-shaped entry volume facing the street is clad in stone on both sides; it contains the laundry/mudroom, coat closet, and bike storage on the right, and the bath and closet for the front bedroom on the left. Inside the front door to the right is a roughly 25-foot-by-30-foot garage volume. Wrapped in sapele mahogany inside and out, it reads as a three-dimensional box that defines the entry gallery and, around the corner, the kitchen’s back wall. To the left of the entry, a plastered core contains the baths and closets for the middle bedroom and rear master suite.
Architects often use the proverbial nod to the neighborhood as an opportunity to riff on familiar forms, and that’s true here too. The sleight of hand starts at the street, where three steeply pitched roofs acknowledge the community’s older houses. The ridgelines extend like the prow of a boat, reaching out to shield the south-facing glass gables from the summer sun.
“One of the pressures of the project was that it’s one lot in from a busy street,” David says, and the house responds to that pressure both physically and figuratively. The folded roof planes are visible from the street, but there are no views into the house. The entry path parallels the offset angle of the busy road, and visitors enter through the 7-foot-thick, stone-clad volume.
Moving inside, the rooflines change shape. “The second you get past the first apex point of each roof, they start to splay in different directions, so that by the time you get into the house, the roofs are different than what you’d expect from the front,” David says. “Everything except the core structures is an undulating open space that shapes above you in different ways.”
Indeed, the interior spaces seem to ebb and flow. The roof folds down to its lowest point at the dining table to make the space feel intimate. Along the east side of the house it extends down to shield the kitchen from the neighbor’s house, then folds to become a wall along the garage. Another low point is over the bath bar that defines the edge of the bedrooms, and from there the roof explodes upward in different directions. It’s at its 22-foot apex over the living area and fireplace, a minimalist steel column separating the dining and living zones.
“The tallest point is also the place where the back wall of the house fractures to create a serrated rear exposure, so the space pressures out, while the dining room is pressured in as the ceiling comes down,” David says. “This creates completely different experiences even though you’re beneath one gestural roof.”
Team Effort
Architects working in urban historic districts have to jump through hoops to get their plans approved, and this house was no exception. To meet the requirement for a gabled roof, the firm had to survey the low and high roof point of houses within 300 feet and design within those averages. Hence the house presents as three simple gables no higher or lower at any point than the neighboring roofs. “If you’re just driving by, you don’t see immediately that the ridge line doesn’t go straight back and disappear, but turns and connects to something else,” David says. “We used time-honored materials found in Alexandria, such as stone for the walls and copper for the roofs. When you drive up and down the street, it’s a different expression but the same voice as houses from 150 years ago.”
Given its adventurous designs, the firm has developed a rapport with local review agencies and seeks approval for a scheme as early as possible—even before showing the client to avoid disappointment if it doesn’t fly. In this case, the planning director worked with the team to bring the gray areas into line with the allowable bulk and square footage. The fact that the roof was 22 feet tall in the center meant that it could conceivably contain a second floor, which would increase the floor-area ratio.
“He said, ‘Look, we understand that the thing is morphing in space, and if we cut one section, it’s maybe not in total compliance at this sliver, but if we move a foot away, you’re in compliance,’” David says. “He agreed because the department wanted something that does more than mimic the relics of a bygone era, and here was a client willing to live on one level.”
With that hurdle cleared, the team created three-dimensional digitized models that the clients could walk through virtually using a cell phone app. “It’s amazing how, at a very simple level, modeling has become a tool you can use to have the client walk down the yellow brick road with you,” David says.
In reality, though, the house’s magical appearance required an extraordinary level of engineering. The design team sat with the roofer to draw up the roof plan, working out the joints for every single copper seam. “What you don’t see is that each of those panels is a slightly different width so that one rake hits the next rake,” David says. “They can’t be the same dimension because the lines would never connect.”
The funky exoskeleton is a combination of steel roof beams infilled with wood framing. Tree columns under the ceiling—3½-inch steel piping that reaches up from bearing points—support the various roof angles. The splayed supports create a more dynamic composition than a point-to-point load and allowed for shorter spans and half as many structural elements.
The front wall was a collaborative effort, too. David showed the owner of a local stone yard his vision for the wall, which was to look natural but rhythmic from outside to inside. Boulders were quarried and cut into exactly the same 8-inch height, and range in length from about 30 to 60 inches. The result is that “there’s a crispness to the wall that’s very tectonic,” David says, “not just organic, messy stone, but all sawn material and crazy-tight joints.”
Art on Demand
That same material rigor occurs on the interior. In the entry gallery, open-tread stairs lead to a multipurpose office with a built-in desk and conference table—a perch on the garage roof that has views of the entire house. The stairs are minimally detailed with steel plates, steel stringers, glass rails, and sapele treads that align precisely with the reveals in the garage siding of the same material. A second flight of stairs leads down to a basement playroom, mechanical room, and storage.
The sapele box makes a mystery out of the service functions, sandwiching a powder room and butler’s pantry between the garage and galley kitchen’s back wall, where those continuous wood panels also hide cabinetry and appliances. Opposite, a Silestone-wrapped island provides a commodious work surface.
If the front of the house reads as a fortress, the back is a glass pavilion gazing north over the pool terrace. David’s team designed the dining table to scale, and two egg chairs in the living room swivel so the couple can turn around and enjoy the backyard view or keep an eye on the kids in the pool.
The double-pane, argon-filled low-e glass is fitted with a privacy shade that can be raised from the bottom to 8 feet, 4 inches along the back wall. A geothermal pump supplies hot water for the radiant-heated floors, and the air conditioning has an additional heating system that blows air against hot-water coils, washing the glass wall with warm air through grills positioned along the top of the glass.
With exterior walls made almost entirely of glass, the design factored in a series of panels for displaying art—several in the back wall and one in each outer bedroom wall. These consist of fritted spandrel glass that doubles as diagonal bracing. As far as placement, “they already had the art, and we knew how the shear walls needed to work proportionally,” David says. “At first glance you can’t tell there’s an art panel, but if you look closely, you can see that the opacity of the glass is different.”
Continuing around to the west side of the house, trees are planted in front of a fence, so the bedrooms feel like they’re outside. The roof drops to about 18 inches above the bath bar, where glass acoustically privatizes the three bedrooms from each other and the living space, but light can travel between the rooms.
Servicing those rooms is the bathroom-and-closet core with a gray plaster finish—a serendipitous decision that came late in the game. As David tells it, “There were these gray dumpsters that sat in the front yard. Every time we went to the jobsite, their color became more compelling, until the client said, ‘Let’s use plaster the same color as the dumpster. We actually peeled off a bit of the paint and took it to the paint store for custom mixing. When they said, ‘What shall we call this?’ we said, ‘Dumpster Gray.’”
At 3,600 square feet, the house is not exactly small, but it is intimately scaled compared to most other new homes in this premium market. The goal wasn’t to produce as many square feet as possible to maximize the appraisal value, but to craft an intricate jewel box with quality finishes.
“Here was a client willing to live with three bedrooms and a single place to cook, eat, and live,” David says. “They don’t need the ubiquitous guest rooms one and two or a giant mudroom. Living within that folded tent on one floor is compelling, and you couldn’t do that with a second story.” Far from being a replica, it’s a singular, shimmering expression of how the owners want to live.
Plans and Drawings
Project Credits
Hull House
Alexandria, Va.
Architect: David Jameson, FAIA, principal-in-charge; Ron Southwick, architect; Oscar Maradiaga, David Jameson Architect, Alexandria, Va.
Builder: PureForm Builders, Alexandria
Interior designer: David Jameson
Landscape architect: Gregg Bleam, ASLA, Gregg Bleam Landscape Architect, Charlottesville, Va.
Site size: .51 acres
Project size: 3,600 square feet
Construction cost: Withheld
Photographer: Paul Warchol
Key Products
Cooktop and ovens: Bosch
Dishwasher: Fisher & Paykel
Countertops: Silestone
Door hardware: Omnia
Faucets: Hansgrohe
Garage doors: Crisway
Insulation: Icynene
Lighting interior: Lightheaded (Dasal Industries)
Locksets: FSB
Paints/stains/coatings: Benjamin Moore
Refrigerator: Thermador
Sinks: Mirabelle, Duravit
Toilets: Duravit
Tub: Americh – ICE
Thermal and moisture barriers: Henry
Underlayment/sheathing: AdvanTech
Windows: Western Window Systems