A model of stately reserve on the outside, the inside of this house with its confusing maze of spaces was anything but.
To travel from the entrance hall to the kitchen and family room one had to navigate a series of narrow, constricted hallways. The kitchen was inefficient and lacked adequate seating. The owners wished to integrate it with the adjacent family room to create a great room and add a breakfast room addition to accommodate informal dining. They also wanted to improve the informal entrance on the lane-side of the house to upgrade their friends’ arrival experience.
Our first step was to clear out the jumble of hallways and replace them with a graceful rotunda to allow for the efficient flow of traffic in any direction. This created a view corridor that draws your attention from the front entry hall straight thru to the back yard. The rotunda leads guests back to the informal entrance hall servicing the side door. Here there are closets for children to store gear, a bench for easy boot removal, and an open stair to the “finished lower level” (because it’s too nice to call “a basement”). The entrance hall flows into a bright and airy open-space kitchen and great room with windows all around and a raised ceiling with wrought iron cross ties. The kitchen has a functional new layout with a large island generous enough to handle food preparation and chatty guests. The breakfast room is the perfect spot to dine; with french doors and windows on three sides it gives you the impression of dining en plein air.
By applying function to the layout of spaces and graciousness to the design of the rooms, this house was transformed from chaos to order.