Tabla de contenidos para 2020 en Old House Journal

WHILE THE FINISHED PRODUCT, a new brick wall, may look deceptively simple, bricklaying is a fine art, a skill that demands precision at every turn. Imagine the masons’ confusion, then, when architect Charles Hilton stopped by a worksite of his one day, and said to the craftsmen: “Throw away your transits, your plumb lines. Just do it by eye.” His encouragement of a freestyle approach got the architect just the result he was after: more than 200 half-timbered bays infilled with brick laid randomly so that no two patterns are alike. Over his 40-year career, Hilton has put much thought into classical architecture’s role in the modern world. He is a stickler for getting even the smallest details right, no matter what genre he is building in. But for this…

OVER THE COURSE OF SEVERAL YEARS, Charles M. Haver and Stewart R. Skolnick of Haver & Skolnick Architects in Roxbury, Connecticut, have been completing parts of a master plan they designed for clients who own a 70-acre gentleman’s farm in Washington, Connecticut. They built the grand, two-story main house, a traditional stone structure based on the style of surrounding barns and cottages; converted a barn into an entertainment arcade complete with a billiard room, a movie theater, and a pub; renovated a guest house; built a post-and-beam barn for the owners’ collection of classic cars; and designed the 2018 Palladio Award-winning enclosed garden on the property. The last piece of the puzzle was the pool house, which won a 2020 Bulfinch Award from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art…

THE TRUE TEST of the timelessness of a house is not only whether it fits the needs of its occupants, but also whether it has synchronicity with the style of the neighborhood where it’s sited. Harrison Design (which has offices in seven U.S. cities and a studio in Shanghai) used this principle in creating an English manor designed for a contemporary lifestyle, but which also fits into the Tuxedo Park neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. Tuxedo Park is a National Register of Historic Places-listed neighborhood in the chic Buckhead area; it boasts the governor’s official residence and features a number of large estates from the 1910s through the 1930s, as well as smaller infill homes built through the 1970s. The husband bought the original house, a 1950s brick ranch, when he…

Newly built but with an antique vocabulary, this rural Connecticut farmhouse evokes New England’s colonial past, both outside and in. TO START, the architects developed the property’s master plan, which would weave together existing farm buildings, the new house, and extensive landscape features. “Our goal was to knit together both the new and old structures, creating a farm setting that appears to have been untouched by time,” says Charles Haver. On the redeveloped property, the star is the main house, set on a rise for optimal views. “The property had an orchard where the fenced garden is now,” Haver says. “We thought an orchard surrounded by fieldstone walls would be a wonderful way to approach the house, so we had an arborist relocate the apple trees, which all survived, thankfully,…

INTERIOR ARCHITECT Suzanne Lovell’s signature touch—light-filled and happy; contemporary with references to history—already graced the entry foyer, family room, living room, and dining room of a 1929 Tudor-style house in Scarsdale, New York. Then the homeowners asked for her input on a mudroom, a transitional space between the back door and the kitchen. Anyone who has remodeled a house in increments can guess what happened next. “The mudroom needed help, and suddenly we were in the kitchen,” says Chicago-based Lovell, who had worked with the family—parents and their adult children—on five other homes. “Working on the mudroom drove the renovation of the kitchen.” The intention was to transform an outdated, all-beige kitchen into a clean, modern space with a classic appeal that honors the original architecture of the home. Equally…

THE NEW OWNERS OF A NEARLY century-old house in New York’s Westchester County commissioned New York City-based Ferguson & Shamamian Architects to renovate it to fit their modern-family lifestyle—without erasing its past. The 1927 Georgian-style stone house was designed by Delano & Aldrich, the New York City-based early 20thcentury Beaux-Arts architectural firm that made a name for itself designing residences for the state’s wealthiest and most powerful players. It was Delano & Aldrich that designed Kykuit, the Rockefeller family’s Classical Revival estate in Sleepy Hollow; Oheka, Otto Kahn’s colossal castle in Cold Spring Harbor; and the prestigious Knickerbocker Club in Manhattan. The Westchester County house, which is set on 64 acres, had not been renovated for 40 years and had been vacant for four years before the new owners bought…

CLASSIC KITCHENS PERIOD PERFECTION page 20 DESIGNER Suzanne Lovell Inc., Chicago, IL: suzannelovellinc.com RANGE BlueStar bluestarcooking.com APRON SINK AND FIXTURES Waterworks waterworks.com POT RACK Ann Morris Antiques annmorrislighting.com TABLE Christian Liaigre liaigre.com 3D PRINTED CHAIRS Kartell kartell.com FLOORING, COUNTERS Petit Granit limestone; more information online at: stonecontact.com/petit-granit/ SUNNY DISPOSITION page 25 DESIGNER Sarah Blank Design Studio, Greenwich, CT: sarahblankdesignstudio.com CONSTRUCTION/CARPENTRY Taconic Builders, West Palm Beach, FL: taconicbuilders.com MILLWORK E. L. Custom Wood Creations, Dania Beach, FL: customwoodcreations.com CHANDELIER Rosie Li Studio rosieli.com INTERIOR FITTINGS AND ACCESSORIES Bradco Stainless bradcostainless.com CABINET AND DOOR HARDWARE Palm Beach Classic Hardware palmbeachclassichardware.com COUNTERTOPS Dekton dekton.com RANGE Thermador thermdador.com INSPIRED DESIGN HOUSE AS A HAMLET page 28 ARCHITECT Charles Hilton Architects, Greenwich, CT: hiltonarchitects.com GENERAL CONTRACTOR Robert J. Levine Home Construction, New Canaan, CT: (203)…

FOR DESIGNER SARAH BLANK, owner of Sarah Blank Design Studio in Greenwich, Connecticut, this job was a dream come true. She reimagined Swedish designer Lars Bolander’s Florida estate’s kitchen at the 2020 Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach. “It’s a real honor to be asked to do Kips Bay,” says Blank, explaining that the Show House raises funds for children’s after-school enrichment programs in the cities that host a Decorator Show House. “It’s a wonderful organization and this sort of project allows designers to try things people are afraid to do in a home, and show them the possibilities.” The all-white kitchen that Blank set out to transform suffered from a lack of cohesion and functionality. “There was no embellishment or integration into the architecture,” says Blank, whose love…

WHEN LANDSCAPE DESIGNER Scott Shrader saw his friend’s just-purchased 1930s home, located in the coveted flats of Santa Monica, California, the juxtaposition of its dilapidated condition and pristine lines was dizzying. “The property was in terrible shape,” says Shrader, the principal of Shrader Design in West Hollywood. “This house really needed some love, especially the garden.” The house, with a traditional design in the spirit of the 20th-century architect Paul Revere Williams, still had beautiful bones beneath its distressed exterior. But the garden was a complete mess. “The only thing we kept was the outline of the pool,” Shrader says. “Everything else was removed, and we started from scratch.” Homeowner Alex Vorbeck, a friend of Shrader’s, whom he describes as a “serial house remodeler,” have worked together many times since,…

As soon as he saw the seven-acre property on a peninsula, Gil Schafer knew it was a special spot. The New York City-based architect had, after all, spent practically every summer of his life in Brooklin, the wee waterside town in Maine, which is home to the triangle-shaped, pine tree-covered lot that took his breath away. “The water wraps around the house on two sides, and when you stand on the land, between you and Mount Desert Island, there are only a couple of islands—and they are protected land,” he says. “There are no lights, it’s completely unspoiled. What’s magical is that when you look at the deck on the house, the railing appears to be in the water—you can’t see land.” His finding the residence was a fluke; he’d…

WHEN CLIENTS in Louisiana wanted to downsize, moving to a home on a bayou near where they’d always resided, architectural designer Terry Pylant and his team did their homework. “As precedent for the design, we studied the local vernacular,” says Pylant, referring in particular to the region’s French Creole cottages and traditional Acadian homes. “Our clients were well versed in the language of the local architecture, and wanted their new home to feel genuine. We toured the area, paying attention to nuances, to details we could work into the design.” Pylant is a senior principal at Historical Concepts, an architecture and planning firm whose guiding standard is to discover in each design challenge the essence of the project’s unique heritage and place. Typically consisting of one main story raised on…