Hockey House

Q&A with Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects

By Beth Herman

Because of a contemporary mom’s burgeoning interest in professional hockey, predicated on a Washington Capitals' championship season, the cramped first floor of a late 1970s 2,800 s.f. residence in Potomac, Maryland, underwent a significant reorganization. The goal was for client advantage in viewing much-anticipated games on the family’s flat screen TV from the kitchen and other points. With a few strategic slap shots, Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects brought her game plan home.

DCMud: Describe the home’s interior and some of the challenges for you in opening it up to the space that featured the TV.

Wilkoff: The house was dated and compartmentalized—no open flow from space to space. There was a convoluted access to get from the garage and entrance foyer into the kitchen through a series of corridors, and a tight breakfast room. The kitchen was landlocked in the back corner of the house. There was also a very small family room that was adjacent to the kitchen but not contiguous to it in any way: You still had to go through the breakfast room, through a corridor, back into the hall, past the laundry room to get to the family room.

DCMud: Were there any prior renovations at all?

Wilkoff: The kitchen had been redone about 15 or 18 years ago and had held up well, but it was claustrophobic. A built-in computer desk in the corridor between the breakfast room and main entrance hall wasn’t used, becoming just a catch-all for things. It wasted a lot of square footage.

DCMud: So how did you begin to use the superfluous square footage?

Wilkoff: The client wanted to make the family room feel bigger without expanding the house, and open up the kitchen to the family room so she could watch the game. We were not going to add a single square foot to the house—everything was being done within the existing footprint. I might add that though the dining room had a cathedral ceiling, it was also not spacious. In fact it felt like you were in a tower.

DCMud: What was the process?

Wilkoff: We opened up as much of those areas as we could. We took out the knee wall handrails in the entrance foyer stairwell -- a typical ‘70s detail where you have a half-height drywall partition up to a wood cap handrail. It had some bold forms but also closed everything in. There was no sense of a vision beyond the space of those walls. A balcony over the foyer that overlooked the dining room had that same detail, so we cut out all of those drywall handrail walls down to the stringers of the stairs and landings, and put in a stainless steel cable rail design which opened everything up dramatically without changing the space of the stair structures at all.

DCMud: And the rest of the square footage?

Wilkoff: We then gutted the series of corridors that were there and put in a new corridor that went from the entrance foyer to the family room, but we put it at a 15-degree angle. This allowed us to steal more space out of the family room to make it almost four feet wider—to use all of those (haphazard) corridors as a single corridor within this angle. We opened a giant peninsula from the new kitchen to the family room. There was also an over-sized powder room off of these old corridors. It had been dead space at the time, so they’d made the powder room really big and the laundry room as well. We reconfigured the powder and laundry rooms to a more typical size. In this way, we were able to steal another 18 inches of that old space and make the family room 18 inches wider one way and four feet wider the other way, all from the dead space.

DCMud: So really without picking up any square footage, you incorporated a great deal of wasted space into the two new living spaces—and the hockey mom client achieved her vantage point(s) in grand style.

Wilkoff: It feels as though the space has been doubled. We also used new cabinetry, fixtures, hardware, appliances. In fact the angled corridor is a porcelain ceramic tile—floor-to-ceiling—for a more dramatic feel. And it created an entrance portal into these spaces, so you feel like you are going through a transitional space. Some AV cabinets were built into the corridor with the same wood used on the kitchen cabinets. The same cabinet detailing was echoed in the dining room so these three spaces related to one another.

DCMud: And the TV—the renovation’s raison d’etre?

We gutted a dated and dare I say hideous fireplace, and put in a remote controlled gas unit. We took the huge wall between the fireplace and the kitchen’s new end windows and put the big flat screen TV on it. It’s centered between the family room and kitchen, so anywhere you are in that space, the focus is on the TV.

DCMud: A real game changer. And speaking of focus, what D.C. building would you say has inspired you the most as an architect?

Wilkoff: I grew up watching Italian craftsmen hand carving stone on the lawn of the soon-to-be National Cathedral. It was old world craftsmanship that is gone today. There were tents on the Cathedral’s front lawn that sheltered these workers all along Wisconsin Avenue as they carved gargoyles and numbered stones going into this gorgeous building. It left a huge impression.

Washington D.C. design news

Just Stepped Out

By Beth Herman

When a recent story on staircases from around the world piqued the interest and curiosity of readers, DCMud decided to explore what the District’s own native sons and daughters of architecture and design could offer to the mix, with results that ran the gamut from edgy to resourceful to sublime.

Using materials such as painted steel with Douglas fir, or maple, chestnut and etched glass, area architects have climbed up and stepped out way ahead of the pack, melding the practical with the magical, taking the concept of a necessary staircase to a whole new level.

Cabin (John) in the sky

For Principal Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects, the expanse of the firm’s office building in Cabin John, Md. was limited due to a tight lot. A structure designed to preserve and accommodate an existing 60-foot tall Sycamore tree and restrictive front yard setback demanded a spiral stair, but as it was an office with considerable traffic, the architect made the staircase 7-feet, 6-inches in diameter for comfort. Shop painted steel construction with helix handrails provides contrast to the grid of 49 18-by-18-inch windows. Treads are ribbed industrial rubber flooring.

Turret trumps all

When expanding a 1940s Tudor structure for a family in NW D.C., Wilkoff created a 6-foot diameter steel spiral stair that descends from the second floor master bedroom suite to the first floor family room. Located behind glass French doors to mitigate sound, carpeted treads in a fully glazed turret complete the airborne design.

Soaring solarium

For Principal Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architects LLC, a uniquely renovated 21-foot high 1969 solarium—part of a D.C. residence—called for a staircase redolent of light and lightness. “The idea for the stair was to make a simple sculptural zigzag shape that appears to float,” Gardner said, noting the area under the stair blends into the floor, helping it appear to do so. Maple treads and risers with polished edges, and especially a translucent etched glass and steel handrail with stainless steel glass clips, add an additional lofty quality to the design.

Stairway to heaven

When renovating a Potomac, Md. residence—essentially a retreat for its occupants—a wooden tower with meditation and massage rooms and a lower level gym were included. McInturff Architects featured a staircase that connects the home’s three levels made of painted steel and Douglas fir, with maple stair treads, backed with Galvalume sheet steel.

Halo Linea low-voltage track lighting is built into a slot in the steel structure of the stair.

Cold at the top

In purchasing and reimagining their own “profoundly mediocre” 1960s standard developer-type home in Winchester, Va., architects Chuck Swartz and Beth Reader of Reader & Swartz Architects concede their staircase is the “most curious” on which they’ve ever worked.

“You can stand on top of the refrigerator that way, which seems like a ridiculous thing to do, except there are books up there,” Swartz said.

Addressing a technical problem with brick veneer on the sides of the building that just stopped at one point, the two gable ends were skeletonized so that they were just studs. Two-by-fours running horizontally were located every four feet, with structural insulated panels on the outside of the building. “We then over-windowed it,” Swartz said.

Left with a skeleton inside on the gable ends, shelves were created off of two-by-two’s that ran horizontally so the gable ends became large libraries. The end without the staircase is served by a rolling ladder from an old telephone building, as Swartz’s father worked for the telephone company.

At the other end, a very large refrigerator was obtained as Swartz loves to cook, encased in a birch veneer red-stained plywood box. An alternating tread staircase was positioned on the side of it, allowing the occupants to walk up and climb on top of the refrigerator to access all the books.

Additionally, the staircase becomes a kind of a sculpture in and of itself, featuring alternating treads and maple shelves as they ascend, held together by red oak that’s stained black. It also acts as a graduated display for art, artifacts and family objects.

A place for us

In Frederick County, Va., another singular Reader & Swartz staircase has several things going for it, among them bleachers made out of chestnut, which is the same as the floor, and which go up to the landing. “They stop so the children in the household can play or you can display things on them,” Swartz explained.

In addition, every other tread—the treads that are not the bleachers—are little maple rafts that sit on them and look like small crates. Once you get to the landing, the part that gets you all the way to the second floor is steel and open treads of the same maple. “It’s a way to think of a staircase as a little stage or amphitheater, or a place to sit and think about whether some of the pieces of the staircase can be different than others and still meet the building code,” Swartz quipped.

Some photos courtesy of Anice Hoachlander and Ron Blunt. 

In a Family Way

By Beth Herman

For the son of award-winning industrial and commercial designer and handicap accessibility activist William L. Wilkoff, the decision to live and work in a single 2,200 s.f. structure, built largely with his own hands, was not as big a leap as it might be for some. Winning an AIA chapter award for design excellence in 1984, the inspired Cabin John, Md. home and office of architect Robert Wilkoff, Principal of Archaeon Architects, underwent a major renovation in 1990 where the third floor office became a master suite, and the practice migrated to a brand new 1,000 s.f. addition at the front.

"One of the main reasons I kept the office in the house was I really wanted to be involved in my kids’ lives when they were younger,” Wilkoff said, acknowledg- ing the idea was not as popular two or three decades ago as it might be now. In true family form, Wilkoff’s wife Martha, formerly a college librarian, joined the practice to oversee administrative affairs when Hannah, now 22 and a mental health counselor, and Kate, 20, a fashion design student at N.Y.’s Pratt Institute (a third generation Wilkoff to attend), were young, with the home office advantage making a close-knit family even closer.

With green building principles nearly tantamount, for the Wilkoff’s, to the intimate family environment they sought to achieve, from the beginning the architect used a heavily insulated Styrofoam sheathing system, uncommon at the time, and ferreted out 5,000 s.f. of reclaimed redwood for the new home and office - something he conceded was done as much for economy as nascent sustainability issues.

“Wood was expensive, so I hunted it down,” Wilkoff said of his early days. Revealing he’d (courageously) rented a tractor trailer he wasn’t sure how to drive in order to meet an incoming load of Western red cedar at the docks in Baltimore, notions of the wood’s passive solar qualities fortified him for the trip. As for the actual construction process, teaching himself carpentry as he went along, Wilkoff said he and Martha, along with the senior Wilkoff and some friends, did all the interior partitions, finishes, set the cabinets, the fixtures, etc., with a general contractor putting up the exterior structural shell. A plumber and electrician were also hired for expertise and code purposes.

“We’d have staining parties. We’d have insulating parties. We’d have bagels and cream cheese or crabs–whatever would entice a bunch of people to come over for a day on the weekend, and we’d put them to work. It took four years,” the architect said, adding at the time he was working 20 hours a week as a consultant and 40 hours on the house.

A Greenhouse Runs Through It

Currently a three-bedroom, 3.5-bath home, the 400 s.f. third floor master suite, nee office, includes an adjacent library/greenhouse that serves in a passive solar capacity to facilitate the home’s HVAC system. According to Wilkoff, the greenhouse’s dark tile floor, which is actually hard-fired ceramic pavers from Italy, sits on a thick masonry mat. At a due South exposure, the floor heats up, radiating the heat back up through the room, which gets to a high point in the greenhouse where openings in the upper wall help draw it into the HVAC mechanical return. In summer, when it’s really hot, a fully-leafed 70-foot sycamore tree provides a huge canopy effect, shading the greenhouse, and shading mats applied to the glazing on the inside of the room reduce sun infiltration by about 60 percent.

In the master suite bath, charcoal grey polished porcelain tiles, resembling granite, line the walls which are ribbed with Corian. Milled to an inch in width, Wilkoff glued the Corian strips to the wall (prior to the tile installation), with a 6-inch deep invisible support Corian window shelf for displaying bottles or other objects. Sited on the other side of the greenhouse wall, corresponding upper wall openings can be seen above the bathroom’s sink and counter area, where any warm, moist air is drawn into and utilized by the home’s HVAC system.

In the first floor living room, a wood stove used for many years as the home’s main heating source stands idle most of the time, with Wilkoff claiming that “…dragging wood in at 3 in the morning on a cold winter day is not quite as appealing as it used to be.” Used on occasion for exceptional cold snaps, the architect explained that based on a concept dating back hundreds of years and seen in pot-bellied stove farmhouses, the wall behind the wood stove is a dense, concrete material with black slate. A duct return on the ceiling opens into the bedrooms above, and fans in each bedroom pull rising heat from the stove into the rooms. Motif-wise, a 1950s Folke Ohlsson-designed Dux chair, Mies van der Rohe glass and metal table, Barcelona chairs and table, a Nakashima desk chair and Le Corbusier LC6 dining room table punctuate the living and dining rooms, with much of the furniture traced back to a store once owned by the entrepreneurial senior Wilkoff who passed away in 2004.

Moving Out But Staying In

Ascended to by a two-story spiral staircase and comprised of four separate rooms including a work studio with four CAD stations, Wilkoff’s decision to create the 1,000 s.f. office addition was precipitated both by a growing family and burgeoning practice that supported up to six team members. With the only entrance to the previous third floor office space directly through the house, privacy had become an issue, though Wilkoff said despite the new space, and to this day, staff traditionally eats lunch together at the old breakfast table.

With client access on the outside and its own HVAC and plumbing systems, Wilkoff said the office addition is almost like a separate building except for a communicating door between it and the house. In the conference room, flourishes like beveled, pocketed wood trim (milled on a table saw in the office) that protrudes deep enough into the space to support presentation drawings and material sample boards preclude tack and nail holes in walls, and banks of awning windows open to the trees for natural cooling whenever possible.

“Being here has its benefits and drawbacks,” Wilkoff concluded. “It’s energy-conscious: I’m not commuting - sitting in traffic and burning gas, but in the middle of the night if I think of something I need to take care of, I’ll come in at 3 a.m. and draw,” he said. Mostly, though, the opportunity to wholly participate in his daughters’ lives from the beginning is what has driven him, and continues to. “This is exactly what I was looking for,” Wilkoff said of his own life.