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Long Live the Queen:
A twin-gabled Queen Anne undergoes a masterful redo

This Old House Article By Barbara Flanagan

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Despite friends’ predictions that the renovation would be a horror show, “we felt like we were on The Love Boat,” Marjorie laughs. “We knew all the players very well,” Charlie Myer explains, “which made it easy to set the budget and schedule, draw up the preliminary estimates, and keep the channels open between ourselves and Michael and Marjorie. Everyone on the job knew this was going to be a fast-track project—under construction before the drawings were done—so we all had to work very closely together. The team met either here or at the site every two weeks for a year.”

The first order of business was to retrofit the HVAC. In order to minimize structural changes, a subcontractor installed three high efficiency gas furnaces that, combined with three air-conditioning condensers located outdoors, heat and cool the home. One furnace, in the basement, feeds the first floor through floor registers; the two others, in the attic, service the top two floors through registers in the ceilings. Many of the old cast-iron registers became returns, while new, matching grills that release heat (or cool air) were installed close to the outside walls, Knerr explains, to warm the coolest part of any room (and vice versa).

Space planning came next. The group rethought the functions of rooms on all three floors. One dramatic switch involved the dining room and den, which traded places so that the latter could be linked to a back deck through a set of French doors. The less used dining room now takes advantage of a more traditional position off the front hall.

In the den, the architects installed bookcases on three walls and ran shelves above the French doors and their sidelights. After tearing out the bookcases in the new dining room, they bumped out a bay window to streetside and fitted it with custom-made leaded glass to enhance the room’s formal ambience. They also built a display cabinet into one recess flanking the fireplace and turned the one on the other side into a passageway to the kitchen.

To “ennoble” the public rooms in the house, the architects widened and deepened the paths between them and enhanced the passageways with significant architectural embellishments, such as a keystone-accented arch leading into the dining room and a carved bracket marking the opening into the living room. A narrow screen composed of balusters that echo those on the central staircase now separates the two spaces. (The original balusters accenting the central stair were rebuilt and stabilized with a newel post carved by Valdemar Skov.)

In order to create a passageway from the front hallway into the kitchen, Myer removed part of a maid’s staircase that separated the two spaces. The old structure had borne a lot of weight of the walls above, “so when we scooped it out,” says Knerr, “we had to add a new beam between the ceiling and the second floor to help carry the load.” They left intact the top flight of the stairs to access Marjorie’s office and the guest rooms on the third floor.

Getting rid of the stairs also gave the architects extra space in the kitchen to extend the work zone; they dedicated the other end of the room to a breakfast area wrapped by a deep L-shaped banquette. Although the materials in the room are familiar to many country-style kitchens—Shaker-style wood cabinets with simple brown button pulls, gray Kashmir granite and butcherblock countertops, quartersawn oak flooring—Myer was careful to specify finishes that were much softer-looking and subtler than the norm. “We painted the cabinets different colors—a cream and a pale pea soup—to blur the line between cabinetry and furniture,” Myer says. To mute the finish, he had the final coat of paint applied by hand on site over two spray-painted shop coats. A subcontractor acid-washed the granite countertops and treated them with a color enhancer and sealer “to take away the shine,” Myer explains. The floors were also specially treated to exhibit a lower luster: one coat of sealer followed by two coats of a high-gloss, water resistant finish (for durability) and a final coat of flat finish (for softness).

On the second floor, the team turned the old bathroom into a walk-in closet and converted the bedroom next to the master bedroom into a spacious master bath, with maple floor laid in a formal herringbone pattern and a tall casement window that imitates a French door. The bath—which opens both to the bedroom and to a hallway leading into the walk-in closet, which the couple shares—is equipped with a period-style freestanding bathtub and a large glassed-in shower, as well as two grooming stations incorporating twin console sinks fitted with Belle Epoque-style faucet sets. The bath also boasts a fireplace, a holdover from the original bedroom.

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