A modernist box among the Victorians
An architect designed the red cedar-clad modernist house for her family on a leafy residential street filled with older homes, writes Tim McKeough
ON a recent afternoon, Leslie Dowling motored down a narrow residential street beneath a leafy canopy, past small, tightly clustered houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with gable and hip roofs and broad front porches.
Then there was a glimpse of something new — a modernist box of a house seemingly elevated in the treetops — before she twisted the steering wheel to enter a narrow driveway and slipped into a tiny carport beneath the structure.
“We both drive Minis” — a necessity for navigating the tight turns, said Dowling, 49, who owns the house with her husband, Carlo Momo, 58.
Dowling, an architect who once worked for Michael Graves, is a partner in Dowling Studios, a bicoastal architecture firm she runs with her San Francisco-based twin sister, Julie. Clad in horizontal red-cedar boards punctuated by floor-to-ceiling aluminium-and-glass doors and windows, and lifted off the ground where it meets the sidewalk, the house, which was completed last year, comes as a surprise on a traditional street in the centre of Princeton, New Jersey.
But perhaps even more surprising is that it is in the municipality’s new Witherspoon Jackson historic district, established last year. When Dowling and Momo bought the lot in 2014, they had no idea a historic designation might be in the works. They were just so pleased to find space in the centre of town that they agreed to pay not only the US$600,000 (RM2.49 million) price, but also the real estate agent’s commission of US$30,000.
“Downtown is bursting at the seams,” said Momo, a partner in the Terra Momo restaurant group, which owns the nearby Terra Momo Bread Co, Teresa Caffe and Mediterra restaurant. “This is right on the seam, so I
But what’s the better response: to build something that looked like what was here or something that is designed for today? Leslie Dowling
said, ‘Let’s do something here.’”
The lot already had “a 100-plus-year-old” dilapidated house on it, Dowling said, which had been abandoned for many years. “We bought it thinking we were going to save the front half,” she continued, while extending the house with an addition on the back. “But it was so rotted and poorly cared for that we couldn’t salvage it.”
SHARING DESIGN
So they gave the porch to an architect working on the renovation of a house down the street, where the singer, actor, athlete and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was born in 1898, and slated the rest for demolition.
Dowling drew up plans for a new building using existing setback requirements as her guide, while looking to maximise space. The house had to be 3.05 metres (10ft) from either side of the 12.2m-wide (40ft-wide) lot, and 10.7m (35ft) from the rear lot line. The height was limited to 9.1m (30ft).
She started with a two-storey box that precisely traced those limits, and then carved out space for the carport and a double-height kitchen to get the total indoor area down to 213.49 sq metres (2,298 sq ft) — just 0.19 sq m (2 sq ft) shy of the maximum 2,300 allowed.
She submitted her plans to Princeton’s building department and received a construction permit before whispers about the movement to create a historic district reached her. A staircase with open walnut treads alongside a wall of windows, with frosted glass for the top floor.
“I started hearing from neighbours saying, ‘Can you show us what you’re doing? We’d like to be included,’” she said.
Hoping to demonstrate that she and Momo had every intention of being good neighbours, she organised a community meeting at the local library to share her design, and went door to door distributing flyers. “I built a model. I made pound cake. It was a real goodwill effort,” she said. “Three people showed up.”
Demolition began in April 2015, without incident. Fifteen months and about US$1 million (RM4.16 million) later, Dowling, Momo and their 14-year-old daughter, Anna, moved into the completed three-bedroom, 3½-bathroom house, built by R. Faucett Construction.
Dowling and Momo now spend much of their time in the airy kitchen, where soaring walls of operable windows bring in abundant natural light and breezes. “I’m the cook; she’s the baker,” Momo said.
The living room has large sliding glass doors opening onto steps that lead down to the grassy backyard designed by Peter Soderman, where their dog, Pepper, goes to play. In the basement, a home office serves as the East Coast outpost of Dowling Studios.
“Could I have come in and done some quasi-colonial thing, as other builders around town are doing? Sure,” Dowling said. “But what’s the better response: to build something that looked like what was here or something that is designed for today?”
The couple’s feelings on the subject are clear — and at least some of their neighbours seem sympathetic. Shortly after the house was completed, representatives of the historic district contacted Momo.
“They invited me onto the board,” he said, adding that he initially felt conflicted as the owner of a modern home.
“I tried to decline,” he said. “But they wanted me anyway.”