The Home of the Year reaches a harmony of 20th century style and 21st century technology.

 

	Photos by Michael Moran.

Strolling through the older neighborhood in Silver Spring, Md. — one that was subdivided in the late 1920s — you’ll see a mix of houses: Cape Cods, Tudors, ramblers, 1960s International-style homes. What won’t be apparent is a new house, yet it’s there. The newest house on the block, a beautiful yet unassuming Craftsman-style home, is the 2001 Best in American Living Home of the Year.

 

The Judges’ Verdict Deciding on the Home of the Year is no open-and-shut case. The winning home is not necessarily the prettiest or most extravagant out of hundreds of entries. It must meet specific criteria: It must have broad market appeal, meet the needs of its market, offer design excitement as well as function, and meet marketplace demands such as high value and energy and environmental sensitivity. The 12 Best in American Living Award judges deemed the custom home in Silver Spring, Md., the most representative of those ideals, but also had personal reactions to it. “On a gut level, it was just pleasing, melodious, harmonious,” says Wendy Ney Manley, director of sales and marketing for Southdown Homes in Downingtown, Pa. She says the home’s proportions were right, the woods and natural materials were warm, and the porch and oversize entry door were inviting. “In a design competition, it’s easy to be drawn toward the expansive designs that have the luxury of seemingly unlimited budgets,” says architect Larry Garnett of Glen Rose, Texas. “However, a substantial segment of the market is looking for something different. In a market that continues to promote contrived and often pretentious designs, this home was absolutely refreshing.”

Chosen by BALA judges for its simple elegance, impeccable execution of details and organic relationship to its wooded, in-town lot, the 3,400-square-foot home is not authentically Arts & Crafts, although it looks it. It uses modern building technologies and materials in addition to handcrafted millwork and cabinetry to achieve a balance between the old and new; the home is low-maintenance and designed to fit the needs of a 21st century family while still embodying the Arts & Crafts ideals of simplicity and craftsmanship.

Fulfilling a Dream
“It is my dream home,” says owner and architect Dale Stewart, a principal at CORE, an architectural firm in Washington. “My wife and I, when we were planning it, said, ‘We’re going to do this once, [and] we’re going to live in this house until we croak, so we’re going to do it the way we want to.’”

Stewart’s wife, Sallie, a landscape architect and the section head of planning at Charles P. Johnson & Associates in Silver Spring, was the land planner for the project. The Stewarts and their builder, Michael Schnitzer, vice president of custom homes and renovations for Stanley-Martin in Reston, Va., were committed to thorough planning and execution from the outset of the nearly two-year design and construction process. Almost every challenge the home could pose was thought through well ahead of time. “We started at the finish end and worked backward in our heads so that we covered every nuance and made sure we didn’t make any mistake,” Schnitzer says. “You have to be thinking of the 25, 30, 40 things that drive not only the builder but the customer crazy asking, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”

The first challenge was fitting the Stewarts’ requisite 3,400 square feet and all the programmatic requirements, such as a first-floor master suite, onto the 70x140-foot lot. There was a danger of overwhelming the site and ruining the neighborhood’s streetscape, as neighbors feared that a new home on the never-built-upon lot would do. The solution was a home more horizontal in character. That effect was achieved, says Dale Stewart, through strong horizontal lines such as the big wraparound porch and long, low first-story roof lines accentuated by the stepped-back second story. The footprint of the second floor is about half the size of the first, keeping the massing manageable on the rear elevation as well.

 

	Starting in the foyer, a pattern of beams and columns in quarter-sawn oak helps organize and give rhythm to the first-floor spaces. A wall divides the foyer from the home’s private areas, but a picketed gap near the top lets light pass through.

With a 12- to 15-foot drop in grade from the front of the house to the back, Sallie Stewart and her husband were able to use the site’s natural contours to their advantage. A side-load garage is tucked at the back of the house, one story lower than the first floor. The basement-level garage gave the Stewarts ample space for their first-floor master, which is over the garage.

The handcraftsmanship that characterizes the Arts & Crafts Movement is noticeable as soon as you’re inside the oversize, custom front door. Carriage Hill Cabinets and Millwork, a local company that Dale Stewart brought on board even before he had chosen a builder, executed the strong, consistent woodwork design that Dale Stewart created. Starting in the foyer and continuing throughout the first floor, the simply but elegantly detailed quarter-sawn oak beams that make up the coffered ceilings not only make the 10-foot heights seem cozier, but also help organize and give rhythm to the space, Dale Stewart says. They also add richness and variety to the ceilings. “In a lot of house designs, you’re really dealing with the floor plane and walls, and the ceiling is a plane that isn’t addressed. The Arts & Crafts style allows us to take advantage of all the surfaces and create spaces and volumes that are different and articulated because of the beams and columns.”

 

	The custom stair is a perfect example of architect Dale Stewart’s commitment to design continuity: The spacing of the pickets in the banister matches that of the pickets in the foyer wall and the front-porch railing.

The back wall of the foyer was necessary to separate the entry space from the living room, eating area and master bedroom beyond, yet the Stewarts didn’t want to cut up the intricate ceiling pattern. Instead of a full drywalled wall, they left an open space with pickets spaced in threes in the foot or so margin above the running head trim. That space lets light and sound pass easily from the foyer and living room in the front of the house into the great room beyond. Focused on small details and design continuity, Dale Stewart mimicked the spacing of the foyer wall’s pickets in the front-porch railing and the banister of the custom staircase opposite the foyer wall in the great room.

That staircase was the topic of many design discussions. The couple debated having front and back stairs, with a grand stair in a two-story entry and another stairway leading up to the three bedrooms in the back. Sallie Stewart’s mother, also an architect, helped them decide that not only would one stair suffice, but that second-floor living space would be more practical than the extra volume of a two-story entry. That logic, coupled with Dale Stewart’s social sense of a stair, simplified the decision. “Typically you walk into a house and the stair is in the foyer,” he says. “It becomes a major element that says, ‘Hello, we’re here.’ But if you think about it, the stair is leading to the private areas of the house. Does it really make sense to have that as the first thing you see?”

In With the Old, In With the New
The Stewarts bought this lot for a number of reasons, including its proximity to their jobs and its location in the same neighborhood as their previous house — a selling point for their two pre-teenagers. They were also drawn to the beauty of the wooded lot and saved about 70% of the existing oaks, hickories and poplars, Sallie Stewart says.

 

	In the spirit of the Arts & Crafts tradition, custom millwork, cabinetry and built-ins add warmth and coziness to the 3,400-square-foot residence.

When they started planning their dream home, the couple had no particular style in mind, but the Craftsman style’s back-to-nature ideal seemed appropriate for the site. It was also a happy medium. “I’ve always liked the Arts & Crafts style,” says Dale Stewart, although most of his work at CORE is on contemporary-style commercial buildings. “Sallie likes it for its warmth and richness as well as the Craftsman qualities. I like it because of the simple detailing, clean lines and simple materials, which is more of a contemporary flavor.

“The smartest thing we ever did was agree upon a style before we started designing.” That, he says, eliminated a lot of arguments and helped pare down some of the process because the strong style dictated certain design decisions.

Even with such a traditional design, it was modern materials and building techniques that allowed the Stewarts to build the house they truly wanted — in both looks and performance. The spaces are much larger and the floor plans more open than their counterparts of a century ago. “Most of the houses had very defined rooms that didn’t flow from one to the other,” Dale Stewart says, “and because of changes in building technologies, and specifically trussed flooring, we were able to get much larger spans with fewer bearing walls.”

 

	As in the rest of the house, the lighting plan for the kitchen, which includes ambient and task lighting, was an integral part of the home’s plans. The small windows on either side of the stove provide natural light and give visual interest and definition to the room.

Hardiplank fiber-cement siding on the horizontal plane and in the second-story shakes made more sense than the wood siding a Craftsman of the 1920s or ’30s might have. Fiber-cement doesn’t rot and is less expensive than wood, but, like wood, the color can be changed. The PVC trim on the windows was chosen for the same reasons.

Schnitzer is pleased with how the stone bases for the porch columns turned out but says the off-plumb bases posed one of those construction challenges that had to be thought through ahead of time. The cultured stone the team chose offered ease of application, but getting the taper right was tough for subcontractors. “Your eye wouldn’t notice it specifically, but if we did it totally vertical, it would look a little boring, but you wouldn’t know why,” Schnitzer says.

The most creative pairing of old-school look with new-school techniques is overhead. The Craftsman style dictated a roof with wide eaves and rafter tails, yet modern history told Dale Stewart and Schnitzer that rafters with ends exposed to the elements can rot. Their solution was to use a trussed roofing system and then attach cedar rafter tails to the ends, giving the appearance of a traditionally framed house but with the economics of modern technology.

Schnitzer points out, too, that the roofers had to pay special attention to the nailing patterns of the shingles on the plywood because its underside, when painted, was a finish product. And to make sure all these individual details came off without a hitch, Schnitzer gave suppliers and subs written descriptions of what they needed and precisely how it was to be used. Each sub then had to present precise shop drawings that showed they fully understood every aspect of the detail before Stanley-Martin would sign off on them.

“None of this is hard,” says Schnitzer. “It’s just making sure we did it up front so we didn’t have problems in the end. We did things individually that are almost meaningless, but incrementally, if you put them together it would have been a huge nightmare to see a lot of construction pitfalls show up in the final product.”

 

	With green Avonite countertops, updated traditional fixtures and custom, furniture-like vanities from Carriage Hill, the master bath has a retro look. The floor joists under the large, barrier-free shower are slightly lower than the rest of the floor to allow for proper drainage.

The family finds itself frequently split up in various parts of the home, with the two kids downstairs in the cheery basement rec room or Sallie Stewart retiring to her front library — her version of the “away” room in Sarah Susanka’s book The Not So Big House. And because the home is as wired as the lives of most modern families, each family member can access phone, data, computer hookups or cable in two spots in each room, with all the wiring connected to a control panel in the utility room.

Still, the central core of the home, the family room, is the most comfortable spot in the house, says Sallie Stewart, and where the family spends most of its time. “It’s where everything comes together, both socially and physically,” she says.

Now that the home is done — if an architect’s or builder’s home can ever truly be finished — it’s gratifying to the Stewarts and Schnitzer that all that planning paid off. Perhaps the best compliment a builder or architect can receive is what Sallie Stewart says of her home: “It lives incredibly well.”

View the lower-level, main-floor and upper-level floor plans.