Modern house a dream come true
Food-industry couple land favorite architect to create clean, open look and a kitchen to crave
Claudia Farinola had gathered hundreds of photos over the years, as she was imagining what her dream home would be like.
It started with a couple of folders that soon were bulging with pages torn from magazines and newspapers, until finally she bought a book to paste them into. On the outside she wrote “Build a Home,” and filling it became her guilty pleasure.
Like a Houzz vision board or Pinterest page, Farinola aggregated hundreds of pages of pretty things. And a major theme was clear: She is a fan of modern design and Houston architect Christopher Robertson of Robertson Design.
“I had photos from four different publications about his Main Street house. I had articles on the Gramercy project. I really was a stalker,” said Farinola, 53, of the photo collection she started long before she met her husband, Brad Dorsey. “I spent a lifetime driving by his dad’s Main Street house. I was the car moving slowly with the flashers on.”
When she and Dorsey interviewed other architects, none could translate their ideas into a home that felt right. Farinola thought Robertson, whose grand designs have been featured in national magazines, wouldn’t take on such a small project — a 3,500-square-foot home in a neighborhood of mostly older townhomes.
“I said, ‘Let’s just call him … maybe the timing is good,” said Dorsey, 52. “We called, and they were up for the project. For Claudia, it was like meeting a rock star.”
The dream book was Farinola’s, but Dorsey loved every idea. They wanted a modern home that was clean and open. Both have always worked in the food industry — Dorsey coowns three Houston-area Crave Cupcakes bakeries with another couple — so everything would revolve around their kitchen.
Both are University of Houston graduates, and Farinola grew up around Pino’s Italian restaurant, which her parents, Pino and Lenora Farinola, opened in 1960s. Dorsey, a Dallas native, worked in the restaurant industry in Houston and, later, in California before returning to Texas.
He ended up in Houston because he and a business partner thought it would be a better location for their bakeries and because his mother needed medical care here.
The bakeries are thriving, his mother is doing well, and Dorsey met and married Farinola.
“We met through Ziggy Gruber of Kenny & Ziggy’s deli,” Claudia said. “Without any advance notice, Ziggy called and said, ‘Claudia, I’m picking you up, and I’m going to tell you where to sit; there’s someone you’ve got to meet.’ We walked into Queen Vic’s pub, and he said, ‘You sit there next to Brad.’ Five months later we eloped. It was instant.”
Her parents had a lot in the Hammersmith neighborhood off Voss that they had owned for 40 years, and they offered it to the newlyweds. “I thought, ‘We just got married — can we survive building a house?’ ” Dorsey said. “We lived in her parents’ guest house for two years.”
Farinola and Dorsey knew exactly what they wanted for their kitchen. And the Robertsons had a vision for the exterior.
“We wanted something minimal and modern but at the same time attractive and expressive,” Christopher Robertson said.
His wife, architect Vivi Robertson, devised an intricate, hinged model that opens like a miniature dollhouse. Farinola and Dorsey — who fired their builder a week or so into framing — became their own contractors and carried that model to their jobsite nearly every day to show trade workers how the steel, stone and concrete structure should come together.
“We knew the plans, and we’re such micromanagers that we could do it,” Farinola said. “Some of the subs were ours from past (restaurant) jobs. We just rolled up our sleeves and did it.”
Christopher Robertson marveled at the job they did.
“We didn’t give them an easy task,” Robertson said. “The house seems like, it’s a box, it’s easy. You know the famous Mies van der Rohe saying ‘less is more’? Well, there’s another saying, ‘“Less is more work.”
First, there’s an intricate assembly of blocks laid pushpull style up the exterior wall of the home. From the street, it looks like it could be a sleek rock-climbing wall; in reality, it shapes the terrace accessed from the living/dining/kitchen area on the first floor.
It went up in steamy August heat with painstaking effort and a color-coded spreadsheet that Dorsey devised from Vivi Robertson’s detailed drawings.
Because the home is in such a busy spot, they created a double front entry with a locked gate, then a door to enter the home.
Inside, the main floor is a mix of gleaming Terrazzo tile, white walls and counters and accents of tall panels of natural wood that hide a pantry, storage and coffee-service area. Modern design doesn’t allow for a lot of counter clutter, so all of that stuff gets hidden away in that storage area and behind Italian Pedini cabinet doors and drawers.
The three-story home allows for a towering atrium over the kitchen, and its skylights have solar-powered shades. The front of the home is two stories, with a master suite perched above a tall sitting room.
The back has living space on all three floors, with a secondfloor TV room/guest suite that two of their nephews claim as their own. The third floor has another guest suite.
Dorsey and Farinola have blended a close-knit family in their seven years together. Their teenage nephews have the run of the house. Dorsey’s mother and sister live nearby. Farinola’s sister and a brother are within walking distance.
No worries that the threestory home has so many white oak stairs. It also has a threestory elevator, even if its biggest fan is their 8-year-old dog, Lucky.
Furnishings are modern and midcentury, including eight original Milo Baughman chairs given to Claudia from an uncle and her godfather. Bathrooms have a European feel, with Italian Pedini cabinets, Spanish Porcelanosa tile and German Duravit fixtures. A touch of whimsy in the master bathroom comes from the David Trubridge chandelier, a quirky lattice globe lined in lime green.
It’s appropriate everything feels European because that’s what their Hammersmith neighborhood feels like, too, even though it was a 1960s-era American creation that went up when this section of Voss was a rural two-lane road.
Hammersmith is just a handful of streets with a common central pool and community area. Neighbors walk its quiet streets and know each other by name.
“This neighborhood has four book clubs,” Farinola said. “They play rummy, mahjong, hand-and-foot. At 5 o’clock, you’ll see people with a basket of something and a glass of wine walking to the pool.”