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was hired to renovate the house. “When we first drove up to it, we View from the main living area toward the dining area.
immediately understood this to be a unique piece of architectural
history. What we did was brought it back to life.”
The renovation entailed relatively few major changes. These
included the removal of the elevator, the filling in of the indoor
pool, and a complete revamp of the kitchen. While such alterations
obviously had a profound impact on the character of the house,
the quality of the renovation is perhaps most evident in the many
subtler changes that the architects made. The bathrooms, for
instance, were a bit too small to meet contemporary standards, so
the architects shifted some interior walls slightly—as little as six
inches or so—in order to create some breathing room. Given the
importance and visibility of the connection between the continuous
glass transoms and the mahogany ceiling, moving a wall mere
inches was no easier than moving it several feet. The architects
worked closely with window and glass suppliers to re-create the
thin frames that were original to the house while carefully patching
the previous locations of the walls. The incorporation of modern
vents for the kitchen and bathrooms required similar finesse.
Other modest but significant changes included reorienting the
master bedroom, which previously received light only from the
high band of windows. The architects removed a built-in cabinet
between the bedroom and the living area to create a large new
opening that can be closed off with barn-type doors. The bedroom
now feels much brighter and more spacious, even when the doors
are pulled to.
A previous owner had added hanging partitions to create
subspaces within the large living/dining area. Rill felt that they Main living area
before renovation.
Courtesy of Rill Architects

Dining area with kitchen in the right background.

Main living area.

Guest room and office on the lower level, in a portion of the space
formerly occupied by the indoor swimming pool.

30 CONFIDENTLY DEFERENTIAL