After deciding to see what the market had to offer, these homeowners were thrilled to find a charming older home, built around 1928, on the street where the husband lived as a child. The house had received few updates from the previous owners, who lived there for about 30 years. “We wanted someplace 
that we felt comfortable in,” say the homeowners. “We both love old houses and a traditional look, but nothing too stuffy.” They set out to add needed rooms to the home, working with Owings Brothers Contracting to preserve the house’s architectural integrity along the way.
Symmetry is an important element of the traditional center hall style—flanking either side of the structure with new spaces maintains an exterior balance. Two wings now contain a family room, kitchen, mudroom, basement playroom, library, and master suite complete with his and hers closets and bathrooms. These utilitarian areas complement the more formal rooms of the existing house and provide valuable family space. The kitchen and adjacent butler’s pantry, for instance, feature an island where breakfast and homework take place, snack drawers for the children, two dishwashers, a laundry chute for linen napkins, and plenty of specialized custom cabinetry—counter-to-ceiling cabinets to hide appliances, shallow roll-out pantry shelving, liquor drawers for easy inventorying, and built-in root vegetable storage with air circulation. There is also a hidden computer desk for household paperwork; the desk and chair tuck out of sight behind cabinet doors.
Careful planning by the project team resulted in seamless additions. “You really can’t tell that the new spaces are additions,” says Owings Brothers’ Wally Owings. Gaining such disguised additions wasn’t easy, though. To start, renovations to the home were performed mid-winter, and the elements were not in the group’s favor. “First there was snow,” says the wife, “then ice, then it all melted, and then it rained for about two and a half months…the driveway was a mud pit.”
Inside, the contractor matched floor lines and ceiling heights, ensuring that elevations in the addition coincided with those in the existing structure. In the expansion, the team used the same 21/4″ red oak hardwood flooring as that in the original house and then refinished all of the floors together with a golden walnut stain. The home’s existing windows contained what antique dealers often term “drunkard’s glass,” which has a wavy look with air bubbles scattered throughout. This glass was preserved on the third floor guest area, but to control the heating (which was divided into four zones), the team upgraded windows on the first and second floors of the home. The new windows maintain the older aesthetic and mimic the previous windows’ size and trim, but they are more appropriate for a modern home, says Owings.
Owings Brothers reused the existing wall trim where possible, doing some on-site refurbishing. But new moldings that matched the original 1920s trim were not readily available, so the contractors removed sections from the doors, windows, and baseboards and sent them to the mill at Reisterstown Lumber, where they replicated the design. Matching trim was then included throughout the addition. “There isn’t a point where the trim looks like it starts and stops,” says Owings. “It’s hard to tell where we added.”
Another bit of trickery to keep the flow between old and new was incorporated in the back hall addition leading to the mudroom and kitchen. The hardwood floor was painted in a black and white diagonal checkerboard pattern, something the wife had seen years before in a magazine. Although the wood was still visible when the floor was freshly painted, “the kids and the dog have also worn it down,” she says. “It looks like an old floor that we didn’t refinish, not like a brand new floor.”
The wife, a former design consultant on sabbatical as “Mom,” was also responsible for much of the interior design, although she did bring in Chambers’ designer Steve Sutor to help with architectural planning and interior layout. “I wasn’t sure they even needed a decorator,” he says, “because she has exquisite taste.” Sutor also played “marriage counselor”—where the husband wanted a traditional look, the wife pushed for more exotic touches to gain a younger feel.
Ultimately, the homeowners’ goal was to produce a traditional décor with a few subtle twists to give the house some pop. For example, an oversized mirror hanging in a tiny powder room to highlight its grand scale. Or the wallpaper pattern along the entrance hall that, at first glance, looks traditional but, upon closer inspection, has an unusual raspberry-colored shadow.
In the dining room, they added metallic ceiling paint for a taupey, luminous quality. A pair of corner built-ins from the existing structure was kept; with low-voltage strip lighting, they now display the owners’ china, whose royal blue bands inspired the blue tones on the faux finished wall. Chair rails and dadoes complete the traditional look.
The team also took a few chances in the living room, where the ceiling presents another subtle surprise—a pale blue color to complement the milk chocolate walls. Two swing arm library lamps, mounted on either side of the original fireplace mantel, throw a warm glow over one of three seating areas in the long room. A punchy color palette of raspberry, clear yellow, and green accents the furniture and window treatments, hues drawn from a Hepplewhite sofa that was passed down to the homeowners from the husband’s parents. When the masculine library was added off the living room, Sutor stepped in to create a symmetrical setup in tune with the traditional style. “I balanced the library door on one side with a matching recessed display on the other side of the fireplace.”
Through that door hides the husband’s refuge, a library dedicated to “his” things—sports memorabilia, old photos, remnants of college life, and an antique desk from his wife. “When we married,” she says, “his stuff got boxed up in the basement. With this new house, he really wanted a place for his things.”
Even though the library was designated as his, the wife admits to Sutor that she sometimes sneaks into the quiet room and sinks into the sofa on a Sunday afternoon while the kids are out enjoying the yard (which can be seen from most rooms in the house). It just goes to show, a house built for family most assuredly has spaces tuned to the individual tastes and needs of each member—whether a library for hibernating, a mudroom equipped to hose down the dog (and sometimes the kids), or a feminine bathroom with a soaking tub and sparkling tile—but in the end, each of the spaces in a house built for family must also function for everyone.
Lauren Brooks is the Assistant Editor of ChesapeakeHome.
Contacts:
Charles Tiles (Kitchen Mural): 410-332-1500
LMS Woodcraft (Cabinetry): 717-859-1909
Owings Brothers Contracting (Construction): owingsbrothers.com or
410-781-7022
The Reisterstown Lumber Co. (Moldings): reisterstownlumber.com or
410-833-1300
Steve Sutor, Chambers (Interiors): chambersusa.com or 410-727-4535
