CAPITOL HILL TOWNHOUSE

Washington DC | Private Residence

This grandly-scaled 1880 townhouse, on one of Capitol Hill’s most important blocks, came to us with a surprising amount of intact historic fabric – from a mostly untouched floor plan, to original plaster cornices and ceiling medallions containing unique agricultural motifs. Our challenge was to augment the building’s character-defining elements and formal spaces with new functional areas for a vibrant young family, reframing the historic elements as key features of the spaces where we live today.

On the main floor, we flipped the arrangement of the two spaces in the rear dogleg of the house, moving the kitchen into a former informal dining room closer to the center of the house, and relocating the dining room to the rear to enable access to the rear yard, connecting the two spaces with a deeply paneled archway, introducing a floor-through sightline, and discretely tucking a new powder room and storage space in the thickness of the surrounding walls, accessed through hidden doors in the paneling.

On the second level, we converted a former dressing room into a show-stopping primary bath, similarly respecting the proportions and character of the existing room while introducing a new use: thickening one wall for a shower and WC, and, loosely inspired by the bathrooms at Nissim de Camondo in Paris, introducing a high dado of handcrafted wall tile. To highlight the historic ceiling medallion in this room, we painted out the ceiling as an accent in Farrow and Ball’s ‘Setting Plaster’, and commissioned a new version of a Josef Hoffmann pendant to activate it.

Client: Private

Contractor: Impact Construction

Photography: Jennifer Hughes

Stylist: Kristi Hunter