The simple furnishings for the interior of the home were specifically chosen so they would not detract from the exterior beauty of the landscape.
SET ON A POINT OF LAND surrounded by a calming creek, the original home was a late 19th century Queen Anne Victorian style farmhouse. Although the house was in good shape, the new owners wanted to double the home’s size while preserving the timeless look of the land and the architecture. Marta Hansen of Allbright & Hansen Architects (now principal of her own firm Hansen Architects) in Annapolis designed an addition that fits seamlessly with the original structure drawing inspiration from one word: restraint.
“We followed the lead of the main house inside and out,” Hansen explains. To create the additional square footage the homeowner required while honoring the scale of the original structure, the addition was submerged so that many rooms, including a media room, wine cellar, sauna and game room, were placed in the basement. Above ground, Hansen was inspired by the timeless building techniques in the original home, which she interpreted in a slightly more modern way.
“Old houses relied on windows for daylight before they had electricity,” she explains, “and often laid out rooms so they could get light from two or three sides. In our addition, every room gets light from several directions and we laid out axial connections to open views from one room to the next.”
Stained deep choclate brown, wood floors give this dining area a depth and richness that is true to the vintage period of the home.
Another characteristic of older homes is that they evolve over time, with volumes added and enclosed over the generations. Hansen’s design created two volumes-the existing home and the addition. To give the structure a sense of organic evolution, a low volume was added to draw the two spaces together. Constructed using different materials and detailing, this new entryway reads like a breezeway that was enclosed over time and reoriented the entrance to the house to a more appropriate place.
“I love that there’s a fair amount of restraint shown,” says Hansen. “Less is more. We came up with a strong, initial schematic layout and kept it simple through the detailing and construction so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
That same sense of moderation carried over into the design of the home’s landscape and its interiors. When Jay Graham of Graham Landscape Architecture in Annapolis came onboard at the project’s inception, he acknowledged right away that the homeowners were enamored of the pastoral peacefulness of the place and wanted to do little to change it. To embrace that style, Graham thoughtfully preened the shoreline, thinned trees so that the water view is revealed through a veil of pines, and used a discreet selection of native plants to gently enhance the property’s natural beauty. “They are city people who come here to relax,” explains Graham. “It’s not about gardens-they want to be in a landscape that’s attractive but they’re not coming as gardeners.”
The pool was built on a narrow site plan and tucked away near a grove of pine trees with a fountain water wall.
The biggest challenge was the pool. “The husband wanted a pool and the wife did not,” Graham explains. “The compromise was that if there was a pool, she didn’t want to see it.” Graham’s design drew on the linear quality of historic Maryland farmhouse architecture so that the house, pool house, and pool create a long, narrow site plan. To keep the pool private from the driveway and the house, it is set low in the grade of the landscape and tucked near a grove of pine trees. Its submerged location allows a retaining wall to take on the secondary quality of a fountain water wall.
“It makes going to the pool a retreat, kind of like a secret place,” says Graham. “You don’t just see it-someone needs to take you there.”
Though the ravages of time may have left the home relatively unscathed, there was a toll taken on the property’s shoreline that Graham noticed almost instantly. As with much of the Chesapeake and its tributaries, human development of the shoreline allowed for erosion that had eaten away the shore, and mature trees that fell into the creek tore away large sections of land. Working with specialists, the shoreline was restored-reinforced with sand and natural grasses-and trees were carefully thinned to create the new, healthy marsh that mimics nature.
The soft, naturally occurring colors that Graham worked diligently to preserve outside also informed the design inside. The homeowner wanted to stay true to the late Victorian style of the architecture and bring a light, clean interpretation of that style to the house. While the couple’s home in New York is full of abundant color and texture-an antidote to the city’s mundane, concrete color scheme-Bidnold was to be a retreat of soothing colors and simple furnishings.
“The interior choices were selected based on the exterior colors of the landscape and sky around the house-the soft muted tones of marsh grasses, the brown of tree trunks, a little bit of color from sunset and sunrise, but mostly subdued colors prevalent around the marshy areas of the Chesapeake,” says New York designer Melody Di Piazza, ASID. The home is void of any overt art pieces, showy window treatments, or exuberant wallpaper. “The idea was for the interior to be a canvas for the exterior,” says Di Piazza. “It’s so beautiful there and it changes with the seasons, so the homeowner did not want to have the art of the interior detract from that of the exterior.”
The interior color choices are based on the exterior colors in the landscape. In the living area, earthly tones and natural fibers dominate the scheme.
To maintain the feeling of a pristine refuge-a blank canvas for the dynamic outdoor landscape-the walls of the home are almost all white and furnishings are sparse. The one exception is the husband’s office, which is warmed by hemlock paneling from the Pacific Northwest. To keep the rooms from looking so Spartan as to be unwelcoming, Di Piazza relied on texture in the form of natural fiber rugs, and accent fabrics such as leather and linen. Depth and richness also are present through the careful use of wood in the floors-stained a deep chocolate brown to “ground” the white walls-and in the custom-designed pine mantelpieces, which were rubbed with wax and left to age. Di Piazza used discreet touches to give character to the design, like the Dutch tiles on the fireplace in the wife’s studio. “They represent children’s games,” she explains. “It’s the most whimsical little fireplace, like a smile in the middle of a rather serious house.”
“The homeowner wanted to, as much as possible, invoke a sense of time travel, of experiencing a different time,” says Di Piazza. “They wanted to enjoy modern life without looking it in the eye.” To achieve this, Di Piazza developed creative solutions to mask the trappings of modern equipment. In the kitchen, she relied on Sub-Zero’s integrated appliances so only the Viking range stands out in the design. In the living room she utilized a Welsh dresser from the 1700s outfitted with custom doors to hide the television.
Like the movie from which Bidnold gets its name, the home is a place of both literal and figurative restoration-a place with a restored home and shoreline and a place that restores the spirit of its world-weary urban owners-that is still in keeping with the original sensibilities of the place that attracted the homeowners at the beginning. “It has a proper sense of place,” says Di Piazza. “It’s an indigenous house on the Chesapeake that has a real sense of belonging.”
Christianna McCausland is a Contributing Editor for ChesapeakeHome.
Contacts:
Graham Landscape Architecture: grahamlandarch.com or 410-269-5886
Hansen Architects: hansenarchitects.net or 410-349-2202
