Home From Any Angle

An artist’s eye for angles adds to the traditional beauty of a Chevy Chase classic.

Photographer Omar Salinas

Leonardo da Vinci chose the angular ratio of TWO to THREE for his extraordinary Vitruvian Man, the great artist’s interpretation of the human being as envisioned by the eye of God.

In the early 1900s, the unnamed artists-disguised-as-tradesmen who designed and created the work of art at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and East Kirke Street in Chevy Chase Village must have shared da Vinci’s eye for angles. The stately Dutch Colonial house they built lounges diagonally across the lot, comfortable as a woman’s arm resting across her beau’s supportive shoulders.

More angles-turned-art await on a steeply-pitched gambrel roof etched in cloud white. Three detailed, arched dormers decorate the roof between its bookend chimneys. A porch with slender columns and segmental pediment enhances the main façade. Railings adorn the top of the first floor like a crown, tempering and yet accentuating the abundance of angles. Wide, dove-gray clapboards trimmed in bright white clothe the exterior walls.

In the back, an unusually angular pool is surrounded by walkways and mini-patios of decorative brick and flagstone. To the side, a garage complements the house, identical in clapboard and colors.

Such is the masterpiece that awaited an elegant remodel and addition by a threesome of seasoned professionals who have formed a de facto team—incorporating high-end architecture, building, and landscaping—to tackle some of the area’s finest restorations.

One definition of angle is “to get somethingÖby artful means,” a spot-on description of the 880-square-foot kitchen remodel and family room addition that the team, Lawrence Q. Kline, general contractor; James N. Gerrety, architect; and John Hughes, landscaper, seamlessly created at the back of the house. It blends beautifully with the house, pool, and garage of this stunning property.

Chevy Chase Village ranks its historical homes based on overall value and importance. This home, classified as a member of the A-list, is among the highest-ranking. Special restrictions and limitations due to the property’s historical significance posed an engaging challenge for the team. “How do you do a tasteful addition where the site is tight and where there are severe [Montgomery County] zoning restrictions on the back yard?” Gerrety mused, summing up a few of the more fundamental difficulties. “And, how do you resolve all the angles to fit into a traditional home when angles are more associated with contemporary houses?”

The Right Angle

The right angle for this project, they agreed, was to eschew the hot trend of design/build firms for a return to the more traditional—and they argue, trustworthy—method of teaming up separate-but-equal professionals with a successful track record of working together. The harmony between the threesome helped to produce a utilitarian beauty fitting for such a lovely home.

“The right group of people fits the puzzle,” Kline said, simply. “We’re offering independent services. We can offer the best of what we do without diluting it—let the designers design, the builders build and the landscapers landscape.”

In the relatively new and increasingly popular “design/build” approach to remodeling, the architect (or designer) and the general contractor (or builder) both work for the same company. But Kline, Gerrety, and Hughes all own their own companies.

As three separate-but-equal professionals, each possessed an undiluted focus for their portion of the work. Perhaps most importantly, they were also able to speak candidly and give each other independent and unbiased opinions about the overall project. “Jim, John and I made a commitment as a team to work through problems together, as professionals should do,” Kline explains. “We’re proud to be accountable for the work we do.”

Kline based his optimism on his own experience. For years, he’s worked to great effect with Jim Gerrety on many projects, and John Hughes always comes to mind when he wants fabulous landscaping. It only felt natural for the three to team up on a number of projects, including the East Kirke house, to produce the best possible work, he said.

About ninety cents out of every dollar the homeowner routinely spends on remodeling goes to construction materials and construction, leaving only about 10 cents for design, they explained. The architect produces a design and a set of instructions while the contractor follows those instructions to come up with the end product—the renovation. The landscaper ties it all together, the way that icing finishes a cake.

“It’s different here,” Gerrety says. “We are going back to traditional roles of independent professionals in architecture, in building, in landscaping, all of us relying on our individual strengths, separate companies, and professional experience to come together as a team for the good of the project.”

Updated Traditional Family Haven

The couple who bought the house in 1984 raised their entire family there—including the quadruplets. They now hope that the children, grown and starting their own families, will view the house as the family’s anchor and visit often.

Acting as a family haven is a familiar role for the house, which was built in 1920 according to the Chevy Chase Village Historical Society. Among the nation’s first true suburbs, Chevy Chase and its electric street car helped to pioneer the concept that people could work in one place and live in another.

Records show that the house, built by Harry Wardman, was sold one week before Christmas, 1920. In nearly a century, only six different families have owned it; one of them for only two years in the 1960s. Three of the families, including the present owners, stayed for two decades or longer.

Gerrety described the initial stage of the project. “How do you tastefully do a remodel-addition on a property like this? My forte is listening to clients. I ask, ‘What don’t you like and how would you improve it? What do you hope to achieve? Why are you doing this?’ If you don’t listen to your client, you will start out on the wrong foot.”

The ultimate results of this approach, a lavish kitchen renovation and a posh family room addition, angle around the existing house, wrapping it in a comforting blanket of utility and style. Exquisite built-ins, fashionable architectural details, and the best of everything enrich the space, made even warmer by a gold, green, and burgundy palette of classic fall colors. The new rooms flow so well with the rest of the house that they not only belong—they even seem to have been there for each of the home’s 87 years.

“We took colors from the very traditional front rooms of the house and made them darker, heavier and warmer,” said Mella Abernathy, interior designer for the project and owner of Bristow, Va.’s Abernathy Interiors, Inc. “Yellow became gold and coral became burgundy. We added deep green rather than blue to make the room heavier and warmer than the front of the house, more earthy.

Before, there was a small mud room with three windows and no access to the pool and patio area. Now, eight large windows frame the outdoor view, and two sets of French doors allow light to flow in while people and pets can easily go into the house or out to the private patio.

The eat-in kitchen and family room is wall-less except for the interior sink, wet bar, and built-in glass front cabinets that hug the old wall. The windows, French doors, and fireplace are positioned on the new outside wall, which stands at a diagonal to a nearby sunroom. Underfoot, the water-heated limestone tile radiates with comfort. Of course, the kitchen and the family room also flow into and complement one another at wonderfully interesting angles.

In a graphic statement of how attractive opposites can be, a large coffered ceiling defines the family room and sitting area in front of the fireplace. Below, beautiful, custom built-ins house entertainment equipment and display the family’s leather-bound books, Asian porcelain figures, and platter collections. Bi-fold and pocket doors attractively close off the electronics from view, hiding a television that sits on a forward-sliding, rotating tray.

Just a glance away, around a visual corner, the inverse of a coffer—a soffit ceiling—juts gently over the kitchen’s heart, an island with a microwave oven cleverly ensconced at one end. “These are architectural details that define wall-free spaces,” Gerrety says.

Gerrety is right, and he and his partners have made a masterpiece, their aesthetic eyes capturing the careful angles and juxtapositions that transform this home into a work of art.

Editor’s Note: Ian Black and Victoria Churchville contributed to this story.