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Long Live the Queen:
Page [1]
[2] [3] The third floor—now equipped with heat and a bathroom—includes Marjorie’s office as well as the extra bedrooms. With a comfortable chair and ottoman tucked under the eave, the office is exactly what she had wanted: “a snug and playful nest.” The hallway just outside also has a “Juliet window” —an opening with a little balcony overlooking Michael’s office—so “we can talk back and forth,” the couple explains. Andra Birkerts, the interior designer on the team, performed some improvements that the architecture could not. “A big challenge,” she notes, “was dealing with the streetside windows, which could not be altered because of restrictions mandated by the local historic preservation board.” To make the windows appear taller, she employed a time-honored designer’s trick: She hung draperies from the ceiling line. Birkerts also used color to manipulate the sense of space, making sure individual schemes “worked together to lead you through the house.” The wall paint falls within a narrow range of pigmentations in neutral tones such as gray-blue, celadon, and butter, while crown moldings are subtly delineated in shades of warm gray. The subtleties implicit in Birkerts’s use of color were not limited to paint: She coordinated upholstery and drapery patterns and textures with the paint palette in each room. In the overall plan for the house, the front and back yards assumed as much importance as any indoor room. Jean Brooks, the landscape designer, joined the team early on. “It was a tiny, flat urban site,” she says, “with standard foundation planting, everything overgrown and crowded. The idea was to create different ‘rooms’ within the landscape and improve transitions between the house and the garden.” French doors lead from the kitchen and the den to a back deck as wide as the house; it, in turn, steps down to a newly graded and planted backyard. When the house was nearing completion, Brooks began to restore and replace the plantings around the house. To define the boundaries of the lot, she constructed a stone wall against a privacy fence abutting the property behind the house and also designed and built a wood fence—and gate (both painted white)—alongside a driveway shared with another neighbor. Now borders, a sunken garden, and a refreshed lawn create an oasis between the stone wall and the house. Brooks says she is particularly proud of the fact that she could rescue the front hedge, which looked bare and forlorn once an old fence came down. Local landscapers pronounced it hopeless, but Brooks persisted until an arborist gave her the advice she wanted: Just feed and prune. The hedge began to flourish. The lesson of the hedge turned out to be the lesson of the house. Listen to advice. Then do what you think is best—with people you trust. |
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