Page 66 - Spring_2019

ArchDC Spring 2019.qxp_Spring 2019 2/20/19 5:19 PM Page 64

Before (left) and after (right) floor plans of the Hotaling Condominium.

Hotaling designed a sleek
Project: Hotaling Condominium,
new kitchen with simple lines
Washington, DC
and neutral color tones that help
Architect: Aaron M. Hotaling Architect make the new front space feel as
Kitchen Cabinet Fabricator: Reform large as possible. He then tied
Contractors: Review Development together the new arrangement
for the entire apartment with new
7½-inch-wide white oak flooring
About three blocks from the Montello, on 20th Street between installed on the diagonal. The
Kalorama Triangle and Rock Creek Park, is the Allen Park, a four- Kitchen before renovation. result is a smart-looking, properly
story, 43-unit condominium building. Completed four years after integrated residence, in contrast
the Montello, it is one of several apartment buildings that sit to the previously dank and arbitrary collection of spaces.
among the neighborhood’s many row houses. It was here that Both Hotaling and Jones had to manage some challenges in
another architect—Aaron Hotaling, AIA, an associate at the implementing their improvements, particularly when opening up
architecture firm MV+A—made his own transition from renter to their kitchen spaces. Hotaling encountered building mechanical
owner by purchasing a street-level one-bedroom condominium. systems above the kitchen that protruded below the ceiling line of
As shown in the pre-renovation floor plan, the unit was oddly the living/dining room. He responded with a solution that turned
arranged, with its living/dining room tucked into the apartment’s proverbial lemons into lemonade, creating a dropped ceiling that
rear. The scheme kept the bedroom close to the bathroom, but frames and demarcates the kitchen while preserving the overall
required visitors to walk down a narrow and dimly lit hallway to unity of the apartment’s main space.
access a rather sad-looking living/dining room that, with one Jones’s challenge involved the concrete floor in her kitchen,
modestly-sized window, resembled a basement TV room more which was one-half to three-quarters of an inch higher than the
than a proper space for eating and entertaining. A second problem floor of the living/dining room. The solution was to painstakingly
with the arrangement was the cramped double-sided kitchen, chip away the concrete surface to bring it down to the same level
whose clear space narrowed at one point to only two and a half as the living/dining room—a noisy operation that could be heard
feet. Taken as a whole, the apartment’s design brought to mind not only by others in the building, but across the street. Jones
claustrophobic submarine movies like Das Boot. managed that situation with the help of gift-card apology notes
To repair this situation, Hotaling first swapped the locations she distributed to affected neighbors. When the chipping work
of the living/dining room and bedroom, putting these two spaces was complete, Jones installed new wood flooring in the kitchen
where they arguably should have been in the first place. The living/ that was stained to match the flooring in the living/dining room.
dining room is now less confining and gathers available light from These two apartments differed in the design challenges they
multiple windows on two sides of the building. He then opened posed, but they both illustrate that small residences can have
the kitchen space up to the relocated living/dining room, creating notable design problems, and that architects can respond to them
a more spacious, better-lit, and functional arrangement for cooking, with creative solutions.
eating, and entertaining.

64 SMALL SPACES MADE RIGHT