DC HOUSE
| NADAAA
Project Name: Rock Creek House
Location: Washington, D.C.
Architect: NADAAA
Client/Owner: Withheld
Project Types: Custom Home, Single Family
Project Scope: Renovation/Remodel, Addition/Expansion
Size: 10,193 sq. feet
Awards: 2016 Builder's Choice Custom Home Design Awards, 2015 AIA DC Excellence in Architecture
Team: Abdo, Builder, Abdo, Nader Tehrani, Katherine Faulkner, AIA, Harry Lowd, Sarah Dunbar, Remon Alberts, John Houser, Stephen Saude, Jonathan, Palazzolo, Lisa Lostritto, Parke Macdowell, David Richmond, Dane Assmusen, Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh, Mahdi Alibakhshian, Sina Mesdaghi, Tom Beresford, Dan Gallagher
An expansion of a 1920s structure on the edge of scenic Rock Creek Park, the house shows how Tehrani can train his mental firepower on the domestic concerns of an affluent family in a quasi-suburban setting. Expanded from two levels plus a basement to four finished floors, the building’s brick envelope is the launching pad for an irregular pattern of windows that hint at the new and more sectionally complex interior: a warren of nooks and crannies, of private spaces that peek into public ones, and of privileged views into the park beyond. “We basically kept the ghost of the existing order,” says Tehrani, who kept most of the rooms in or close to their original alignment.
The biggest shift by far is in the northeast garden façade, which ceased being load-bearing and became a curtainwall. “A reconstructed Frankenstein monster,” as Tehrani calls it, the approach allowed for even more windows, the new openings furnishing castoff bricks used to pop up the attic into the new upper floor.
The house’s signature moment—if NADAAA can be said to have signatures—is in the central stairwell, a bristling array of wooden banisters. Aesthetically and practically, it recalls the vertical metal louvers in the firm’s Melbourne School of Design (with John Wardle Architects), with warmer materials and more subdued details as befits a residential project. Everything about the house, in fact, seems to find Tehrani in a more toned-down mode. “What we’re doing nowadays is decomposing, erasing, curating,” he says. “We’re eliminating the marks, so you come and pay attention to the irreducible aspects of the project.”
The Rock Creek House is an adaptive re-use project of a 1920's brick structure that was originally composed of two floors, as well as a mechanical basement at the garden level, and an attic that offered storage space. This renovation and re-adaptation leveraged the connection with the landscape and the robustness of the existing structure to modify the attic and basement to double the size of the house, while offering room for an expanding family of 5, with and added 2-3 staff members.
Urban on the north face at street level, the property gives way to a dramatic drop on the southern side in relation to Rock Creek, and the extended natural preserve that is its legacy. The house builds up on the formality of the front - its requisite symmetries, order and tone - while giving way for a more open informality on the south taking advantage of the relationship to sun and greenery.
