Transforming a rowhouse into a more modern home

Fifty years after the 1968 riots in Washington, the once-charred 14th Street corridor shines with glossy apartment buildings, chic eateries and upscale shops. This real estate boom is attracting well-heeled home buyers to invest in renovating the historic rowhouses dotting the urban neighborhood.

“We wanted to move to where the action is,” says Ugo Fasano, 61, a Brazilian-born economist who recently retired from the International Monetary Fund. “Everything is here. We can walk to restaurants, cafes, stores, galleries, downtown. There are so many choices.”

In 2016, Fasano and his husband, fine-art photographer Manuel Morquecho, 51, purchased a townhouse a block from 14th Street for $1.41 million. They then spent about $600,000 on improving the three-story building, which dates from about 1900, to create a two-level home and a rental apartment.

“The house was in horrible shape, but we realized it had potential,” Fasano said.

For the ambitious renovation, the homeowners hired architect Andreas Charalambous of D.C.-based Forma Design, based on his refresh of their previous residence, a 1970s townhouse.

“This project was more challenging,” Charalambous said. “The stairs were too steep, the bathrooms were in the wrong locations, and the rooms were small and dark. We opened up the interior and basically created a sandwich of modern design between the historic facades.”

Inside, the pared-down, open-plan spaces have more in common with the new lofts along 14th Street than with the landmark Victorians in the neighborhood.

The homeowners, however, couldn’t change the exterior of the rowhouse. They were required to preserve the historic facades because L’Enfant Trust, a D.C. nonprofit, holds a conservation easement on the property.

Nevertheless, energy-efficient, double-pane windows were inserted into the original openings, and brick walls were repaired and repainted.

The interiors, unaffected by such stringent preservation regulations, were gutted, and the decor simplified with white walls and ceilings and pale, wide-plank oak floors.

The only preserved vestiges of the original interiors are moldings around the windows in the front bay of the living room. The rooms are stripped of baseboards and trim to create a spare backdrop to contemporary furnishings, colorful paintings and Morquecho’s black-andwhite photography.

“We love contemporary design for its clean look, open plan and harmony throughout the rooms,” Fasano said. “We also thought that our eclectic collection of art would be easier to appreciate in a contemporary design.”

Because the rowhouse comprises two dwelling units, the renovation began on the ground floor to make over the apartment with a new galley kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. The upper two floors then were reworked into a home for Fasano and Morquecho, with two bedrooms, instead of the original three, and three bathrooms. The process took about a year, and the homeowners moved into the rowhouse in early 2017.

One of the challenges of the rowhouse renovation, Charalambous points out, was making sure daylight reached the central part of the interior, because the only sources of natural illumination are the windows at the front and back and a skylight on the roof.

“We maximized the distribution of daylight by deleting walls and other obstructions, and using glass stair railings and reflective surfaces,” the architect said. “The skylight on the top floor lets light in and, by inserting an open-tread staircase beneath it, we let the light filter all the way down to the lower floors.”