Woodway Hideaway
An award-winning remodel transforms a "dark, hunkering block" into a high-style sylvan sanctuary.
Miller and Williams’s plan also bestowed the house with its most memorable features, two scarlet rectangular boxes at each end that serve as storage areas, and says Miller, “are datum points within the plan.” Meaning: The boxes anchor the design and dictate the flow. But the element that spun the AIA jurors’ citation into an adverb-abusing fit about how BCJ made the place “programmatically and spatially better” is the central ipe-bedecked hallway that divides the public and private spaces: Entertainment room, living room, kitchen on one side of the spine; kids’ rooms and master bedroom on the other.
Today, piles of CDs and books create their own datum points. A couple guinea pigs squeal from a cage in a corner; recent chalkboard drawings in another corner make for a sort of Lascaux for kids. Outside a dog of uncertain breed patrols the grounds with a traffic cone chew toy hanging over his jowls. All reveal the project for what it’s always been, indeed what those motorcycle rides a decade ago in search of the perfect dwelling were about—something more important than privacy or wrestling with celebrity.
On a recent Friday afternoon, sloshing through wet grass in rain, the homeowner nodded with pride toward a garage-door window his son accidentally smashed with a baseball, which steered the conversation back toward the original homeowner, the 1950s patriarch who couldn’t loosen his Windsor knot fast enough for his appointment with the bar in his isolated den after work. “Who was that guy? My dad had a little bit of that in him, but he always wanted to spend time with us.”
Published: April 2009
