Jason and Priya Downes were strolling in a Moscow park the day before a friend’s wedding when his cell phone rang. It was their neighbor Jill telling them, “Uh, there’s a small problem.”
A torrential downpour the previous night had knocked a giant oak tree into their house, tearing off a corner of the roof as it crashed across the deck, smashed the sunroom windows and wiped out a hillside of azaleas.
“The irony is we were basically hemming and hawing about renovations,” Jason Downes said, showing pictures of the damage as Colin and Windsor, miniature dachshunds, lapped his ankles. “Then the tree fell (in May 2008) and it was a sign.”
The Downes’ two level contemporary sits high on a hill in a small enclave of contemporary homes in leafy Cleveland Park. From the second floor deck and through the interior windows the winter view is dramatic.
“You can see the (National) Cathedral, and sunrise over the city has wonderful color,” Downes said.
The couple arrived home from Moscow to a whirlwind round of consulting with contractors, architects and designers, finally settling on Studio HTO Design Build. The roof was repaired. The deck was replaced with a slightly longer version, using pressure-treated lumber.
But it was the sunroom that took the most imagination to pull off.
“We struggled with the sunroom, what to do with it, for a long time,” said Humberto Vazquez of Studio HTO. “We had to repair the ceiling, roof structure and glass panes.”
In addition, the wood frame was rotted. “The room was 20 to 30 years old and continually exposed to rain and snow.
There was no way we could leave it as it was,” Priya Downes said. It was basically a glass box. Too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer.
“We sat down together and tried to keep the elements of the room with the glass all around,” her husband added.
They thumbed through window catalogues to visualize different possibilities. “We weren’t happy with the height of the indoor beams,” Jason said, because they were too short.
“So the first thing I said was, ‘we’ll raise the roof,’ said Vazquez. “We brought in six different sub-contractors to show us glass enclosures.”
“Humberto invited us to his house in Reston. It was modern, angular and round,” Jason said. “And, eventually we came back to what he first suggested.”
So the roof went up, raising the ceiling to 12 feet, skylights were added and four casement and three fixed bowed windows replaced the straight-edged roofline.
Simultaneously with the outside work, the kitchen was opened up to the living-dining area and the space got a cathedral ceiling to make it bright and airy.
The rough cedar-painted siding was redone in mustard-yellow making the house look like a giant flower in the middle of the forest. The once-crushed sun room is now an extension of the living-dining-kitchen area and a high-in-the-sky year-round haven overlooking a forest of greens in summer and a rooftop cityscape in winter.
Vendor box
General Contractor
Humberto Vazquez
Studio HTO Design Build LLC
2025 Peppermint Court
Reston, Virginia
571/201-8699.
[email protected]
Windows and skylights
Smitty’s Building Supply
8457 Richmond Highway
Alexandria, Va.; and,
11801 Balls Ford Road
Manassas, Va
703-780-7800
smittys.com
Paint
Monarch Paint & Wallcovering
5608 Connecticut Ave., NW Washington
202-686-5550
monarchpaintandwalls.com
(color used outside is ‘artichoke hearts’)
