Woodway Hideaway
An award-winning remodel transforms a "dark, hunkering block" into a high-style sylvan sanctuary.
They found this house, a one-story postwar affair. Built in 1950, the building was always modern in form—unadorned, angular—but it was also moody and uninviting (guests sometimes had trouble finding the front door) and was, in the words of one architect, “a dark hunkering block.”
In the lore passed down from homeowner to homeowner—our guy’s the third—the original family, back in the early ’50s, was led by an overworked patriarch who charged through the door each weeknight and honey-I’m-homed his way back to his personal bar in the den, where the workday dissolved to the clink of slowly melting ice in a tumbler.
Not a man likely bothered that that den and the master bedroom were at the opposite end of the building from the rest of the bedrooms; or that a closet area at the entryway had to be circumnavigated in order to reach other areas of the home. A series of remodels over the decades created an even more foreboding tangle of hallways and walls. By 2000, when the current owners moved in, the home had become a confounding maze. When their toddler son was old enough to walk he would awake at night, lost in the dark, calling out for help—one evening stuck in a refrain of “find mommy, find mommy.” Time for a remodel and a visit from architect Robert Miller, a preternaturally calm man with a penchant for pastel dress shirts.
In 2003, Miller sat with the family at the dining room table to sketch ideas. When the owners’ son began playing near the architect’s feet, and their daughter began sketching, too, Miller had a revelation. “You could tell it was a very close-knit family. They wanted to be connected.”
Months of poring over plans and nearly two years of construction later, the home is dramatically different. “Our entry sequence changed so you entered the building, and you saw through the building to the large red door at the opposite end,” Miller explained. No more maze. He raised the ceiling, bringing more light into the sunken living room. Windows in place of walls make the room seem as though it extends into the verdant yard, while dense foliage and a security gate with intercom ensure the fame-shy family doesn’t feel like it’s in a fishbowl for all the world to peep.
Published: April 2009
