Community Matters!

Q&A with Susan Stine of Redteam Strategies

By Beth Herman

As owner of interior design and strategic planning firm Redteam Strategies, Susan Stine is a long time resident of D.C. landmark The Westchester, 4000 Cathedral Avenue NW. She has served and continues to serve on many of the building’s committees, including as former chairman of the house committee that oversaw the comprehensive redesign of the building’s public spaces, completed in 2010. DCMud spoke with her about old vs. new and her traditional outlook on what it means to live in the District.

DCMud: In the last five years, D.C. has had this huge push to build new apartment buildings—part of the urban planning concept known as Smart Growth America. It’s building around public transportation - building up urban areas so it’s a work/live/play scenario. There’s now a lot of new product on the market, largely for rent, but what about people who want a different kind of lifestyle and wish to buy?

Stine: Washington has some very significant older apartment or condominium buildings that are beautiful, and The Westchester has the lowest fees and biggest apartments per square foot–and it’s on 11 acres—it’s a real, established community.

DCMud: In what sense?

Stine: People say that you buy here because of the square footage but stay because of the community. We have people at the Westchester who have moved around within the (five building-) campus four and five times. They purchase up or they purchase down. It’s a real community within Washington, D.C., and there’s something to be said about buying into that.

DCMud: In 2010, we reported on a kind of democracy in action major Westchester renovation, where residents were given a voice and got to vote for their favorites.

Stine: Unlike many newer buildings, a few older communities and particularly The Westchester are more likely to involve its member-owners in processes such as major renovation decisions. We embrace transparency because we think that makes the community better and stronger. In 2008 we began a major redesign executed through surveys, workshops and focus groups, with each household getting to vote on key components of the project. You generally don’t find that in newer properties.

DCMud: So there are opportunities for involvement on many levels.

Stine: You’re living in history, you’re living in a community, and you’re getting a lot of square footage—plus you’re still convenient to downtown. When you go into a new apartment building, you’re right smack downtown and your community is outside of your building—it’s on the street. Do you meet your neighbors? You might meet them on the treadmill, but that’s it. People buy into older, established communities like this because of the history, and they become a part of it.

DCMUD: Speaking of history and design, do you have a favorite venue in the District?

Stine: It has to be the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, which underwent the most beautiful restoration about 10 years ago. Then five years ago, a canopy was created there to join two buildings together. I go all the time to restore myself because it’s filled with art and feeds my soul.

Washington D.C. design news

Into the Light

By Beth Herman

In 1882, when the Edison Illuminating Company shined its 110-volt incandescent light on a brave new world from the Pearl Street Station, the lives of an estimated 59 trend-setting customers in lower Manhattan would never be the same.

When lighting specialist John Seward entered the world of lighting design and sales 101 years later, and with Edison’s parturient idea of the light bulb morphing into such behemoth concepts as fluorescent, metal halide and halogen lamps (or bulbs), compact fluorescent lights (CFL’s), decorative neon and that swinging ‘70s and’ 80s confection: track lighting, consumers were faced with choices rivaled only by the late 20^th century’s emerging electronics technology.

Confronted even more today with ecological, economical, aesthetic and progressive choices that may have rendered even the reportedly indefatigable Mr. Edison catatonic, merchants, designers, engineers and consumers face an evolving market that, by the 4^th of July, has already relegated the previous January’s breakthrough product to the cornfield.

The Incredible Shrinking Filament

“The tendency is actually about less lighting now, if anything, in the interest of energy costs,” said Seward, who is now president of D.C.-based Illuminations, Inc., which provides product showrooms and expert solutions for lighting. “Rather than just putting in a dozen recessed figures at 150-watts a pop, people are much more concerned with the number of fixtures that are going in there,” he explained, noting consumer reaction to trends that point to a smaller carbon footprint.

Observing that the commercial lighting industry has changed entirely with a stringent 1-watt per s.f. government mandate, Seward said the requirement has filtered into the residential market as well. Savvy homeowners are increasingly aware that incandescent lamps (or bulbs), such as the 100-, 75-, 60-watt versions, are scheduled to disappear from the market, with the 100-watt lamp gone within the next 24 months, Seward believes. “People are beginning to wonder, when they purchase a fixture, is it going to be adaptable to the changes in lamps that we’re now seeing,” he said.

LED There Be Light

According to D.C. interior designer Susan Stine, president of RedTeam Strategies, everyone wants to switch to LED (light emitting diodes) lighting. “All of my clients - commercial and multifamily residential - they’re all beginning to look at this technology,” she said, citing LED’s energy and cost savings, as well as its property limitations, in its current form. “It costs $360 a year to operate one (conventional) light bulb; it costs $36 a year to operate one LED bulb,” she explained. The problems, however, are that because the technology is still in a relatively nascent stage, LED lights are not powerful enough, as they are more about accent or spotlighting, and their “color temperature,” or range of color, is lifeless or very white - at the higher end of the color spectrum. “We are used to incandescent (and halogen) light, which is at the lower end,” Stine said, adding that residential, hospitality and retail expectations are in line with those products’ warmer, more natural light. 

In fact Seward said that when sustainability-minded residential customers ask to do an entire home using LED technology, he dissuades them and opts instead for LED in tandem with more mature forms of light. “It’s coming, but the technology just isn’t there yet,” he said of the former.

Acknowledging that his showrooms have always displayed a lot of fluorescent fixtures, Seward, whose business caters largely to the commercial trade, said the merits of using CFL technology include longer lamp life over incandescent, as well as a color temperature that doesn’t emit heat, unlike the former, thereby straining the HVAC system. 

When residential customers are approached about using fluorescent lighting, however, Seward said many recoil at the thought, recalling early incarnations of the technology which rendered it cold, flat and blue or white, much like LED lighting is now. Fluorescent lighting works much better with skin tone now, according to Seward, and color temperature can be variegated, making it more acceptable for kitchen and bathroom use, with the only caveat being CFL’s inability to work with dimmers. “Most people want the fluctuation in a dining room to create different atmospheres in that room,” he explained.

Time for Recess

Where recessed lighting is concerned, people are beginning to embrace the idea of CFL’s in their recessed fixtures, according to Seward, because again incandescent light is synonymous with added heat. Fluorescents’ longer lamp life - about 10,000 hours as opposed to 500-700 hours for an incandescent A-19 bulb - is important, though it is nowhere near as long as LED lighting where a fixture reportedly left on, unattended, could potentially last nine years. “We’re just reaching the end of tests on LED to figure out how long they do last,” Seward said, in that they are part of an industry that has not yet been regulated. 

Somewhere in the middle, halogen lights, popular in retail spaces and in lighting residential art due to their color rendition, have a lamp life of about 3,000 hours.

On the environmental downside, fluorescents contain mercury, Stine explained, which creates a disposal problem. To that end, she often uses metal halide, around since the early 1960s, in her commercial designs. Though it has slow start-up properties, “it’s a very bright, powerful, clear light, and low-wattage."

Tasks-R-Us

With task lighting the new black, or rather green, and consequently in a huge bow to sustainable office practices, Seward said that instead of just covering the ceiling with light, businesses are using more and concentrated light such as a 3-watt LED task light. “You can see how that would take precedence over a 24- or 36-watt fluorescent in the ceiling,” he affirmed. Citing a trend popular in Europe for about eight years, high-powered fluorescent floor lamps with motion sensors act like torchieres, Seward explained, and are portable so if you change your space, you just pick up the lighting and take it with you.

At the University of Maryland in Baltimore, Illuminations, Inc. is involved in a 70-office project where floor lamps with bases in the shape of a platter, with powerful fluorescent lamps in the base, use the ceiling off of which to bounce light. A diffuser also impacts the light, so that task lighting is as available as the aforementioned ceiling light.

“Everybody seems to be concerned about doing the right thing,” Seward said, comparing the explosive growth of the lighting industry only to that of computers. “The industry is changing dramatically, and as business owners and lighting design specialists, we are constantly researching what’s next.”

All hail the Pearl Street Station.

HITT Hits a Home Run with New Falls Church Facility

They say all that glitters isn’t gold. Sometimes it’s silver, and that’s the goal for Falls Church, Va.-based HITT Contracting Inc.

Seven months into its brand new 140,000 s.f. facility at 2900 Fairview Park Drive (HITT occupies 2 1/2 floors of the four-story building), the 73-year-old company with annual revenue of more than $900 million and 700 employees in five cities has just finished the LEED certification commissioning process, with Silver a viable prize.

Occupying only 6 percent of a 17-acre Fairview Park campus, reduced site disturbance was one of many objectives on HITT’s relocation agenda. The company was compelled to move from five disjointed buildings in another part of Falls Church due to a consistent growth pattern. But housing approximately 400 Falls Church-based employees and showcasing its business weren’t the only goals that HITT, with 47 green building projects in various stages of development or completion, wanted to meet. Working closely with owner/developers Fairview Property Investments, LLC and Rushmark Properties, LLC, along with Noritake Architects and interior designer Susan Stine, principal of Red Team Strategies, HITT chose to become a beacon of green construction in its own right.


“From the beginning we took the approach from a LEED perspective that we want to do things that make sense,” said Kim Pexton, HITT’s Director of Sustainable Construction, a LEED-accredited professional (AP) since 2001 and former 5-year member of the local U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) national capital region board. “But we don’t want to fit a square peg in a round hole. If there are particular credits and design requirements behind those credits that don’t make sense for us and our facility and our beliefs, we said we’re not going to do it. …We just wanted to do what we felt was right,” she affirmed.

To that end, and with the responsibility of maintaining its vast, gently sloping campus, HITT worked with landscape architects Rhodeside & Harwell, Inc. to institute rain gardens as part of a storm water management system (gardens for this purpose are not a LEED requirement). Utilizing a native and drought-tolerant planting scheme requiring no permanent irrigation system (LEED compliant, if one elects to have a garden, when pursuing water efficiency credits), the rain gardens treat runoff from the upper half of the parking lot. Without these gardens, untreated water would flow directly into the site’s storm water management ponds.

Two storm water management ponds - one large and considered primary - receive rainwater diverted through the gardens from other places on the property, some channeled by strategically placed regionally-imported boulders (rather than unattractive culverts and drainpipes), with suspended solids and phosphates settling into the ponds. The water then goes back into the watershed. To enlighten visitors about the way it works, with green education part of the LEED accreditation process, a series of recycled signs made of resin and metal with a VOC-free printing process punctuate the site.

Roots and Reflective Materials

Stine, who first designed the company’s headquarters 17 years ago, recalled that W.A. HITT Decorating Co. started as a tiny, family run business during the Great Depression. Co-founder and matriarch Myrtle Hitt, who Stine knew personally, worked and handwrote checks until a week before she died at the age of 90. Current Chairman Russell Hitt, Warren (W.A.) and Myrtle’s son, is credited with growing the business into a world class interior contractor. Though the mantle has been passed to Co-presidents James Millar and grandson Brett Hitt, Russell – with a proclivity for the word “howdy” and a legendary perfectionism that included taking a hammer to a wall of which he didn’t approve – reportedly still gets to work at 4 a.m. each day, crossing HITT’s light reflective outdoor concrete surfaces or “impervious paving.” According to Pexton, these surfaces, as opposed to blacktop, reduce the heat island effect. She noted they also have a white reflective membrane on the roof instead of a traditional black roof, which reduces roof temperatures by 30 degrees. “It has a huge impact on interior spaces and your overall demand for cooling,” she explained.

The building’s interior includes an aptly named “Redskins room” replete with leather recliners and a 50-inch flat screen TV. Other entities include a training room for ongoing classes, café for breakfast and lunch, coffee bar, reprographics shop, dry cleaning drop-off and pick-up point, hair salon (by appointment), and a 5,180 s.f. warehouse for building materials with protective plywood walls recycled from its former headquarters. Estimated to use 46 percent less water than the previous building, plumbing fixtures are dual flush with waterless urinals in the men’s rooms. Pexton said HITT met the LEED innovative wastewater technology requirement, which is to reduce sewerage conveyance by 50 percent. A ladies room across from the company’s fitness center boasts a steam shower and also a wheelchair accessible/no threshold shower, with fitness center floors made of recycled rubber. Sweeping glass doors open from the center of the gym provide access to a walking/bike path.

See and Be Seen

According to Stine, HITT’s lighting system uses T5 technology. Ninety-seven percent is motion sensor-triggered, including office task lighting, with metal halide systems in open work areas to cut down on wattage. Overhead lighting is reduced by about half from the old building, attributed in part to 25-30 percent more glass in the new facility. From most points in the building, employees have great views to the outside and a lot of natural light coming in. In fact, two of the facility’s three reclaimed White Oak staircases are glassed in and by their nature motivate employees to use them instead of elevators - a large part of the design statement and criteria, Stine said.

With visibility key in every sense of the word, in its continuing pursuit of business HITT liberally uses interior glass to display its bid room – the company’s nerve center – to clients and other guests, as well as in its recruitment strategy. James Landefeld, senior vice president of major projects, explained that the bid room’s 16 equally-spaced hanging microphones have replaced the relic spider phones in most conference rooms' middle of the table, allowing up to 32 seated staff to simultaneously participate in conference calls with subcontractor prospects. The room is also equipped for video conferencing, which according to Landefeld will come in handy for long distance meetings as HITT embarks on a $62 million Tier III data center for the Denver Federal Center. While placed outside the bid room for all-company access, a computer operated "Bid Board" that is displayed on a 65" monitor has replaced the traditional white board in terms of efficiency.

With 3,000 projects on its dance card each year and a campus designed to facilitate business into the future, HITT remains committed to life in its present environment. Casting an eye to the very distant future, however, the building was conceptualized to accommodate multi-tenants with minimal incursion into its current design, yet another hallmark of its sustainability.

Design by Democracy

If it’s true that two cabinet members, 31 congressmen, 12 senators and 14 judges are counted among the most celebrated residents at the The Westchester, at 4000 Cathedral Ave NW, it may also be said that the 79-year-old co-op is steeped in democracy.


In the spring of 2008, when the time came to consider restoring and renovating the structure’s storied interior – its public spaces that had been redesigned once before by mid-century design doyenne Dorothy Draper – the Westchester’s board of directors elected to put democracy in action and recruit hundreds of member-owners in the decision-making process. With four distinct buildings, each with its own lobby and personality, the project was to be massive in scope and scale. Defined by elements both from the 1930s (steel fanlight windows; etched art deco elevator doors) and from Draper’s reign in the 1950s (wing chairs; crown sconces; a broad brass interior railing), the Westchester was also saddled with more random components such as an outdated mechanical unit in a closet. A June 2009 press account of the arrest of former State Department official and alleged Cuba spy Walter Ken Myers and his wife, long time residents of the property, reported that the building had “shabby carpets,” something the 13-member board of directors took quite seriously in its restoration/ renovation plans. With a preservation architect hired to mastermind a plan, efforts to redefine The Westchester without sacrificing its historical elegance would require a marshaling of innovative forces, and more than just a simple nod to its back story.

Democracy and Demography

“When we started the process, we started out with a town hall meeting,” said board member Susan Stine, noting that the eldest member of the diverse Westchester community is 102 and at the other end of the spectrum, a brand new baby is about to be born. “We showed historical photographs; we talked about the process and how you make decisions, and we talked about our guiding principles (these included maintaining architectural integrity, enhancing the feeling of community, and effecting sustainable improvements into the future).” Stine, principal of architecture and planning firm Redteam Strategies and a Westchester resident, is no stranger to commercial design and understood that “a lot of times in large companies, people don’t get the sense that they have any choice. With something as dramatic as their lobbies, they really want a lot of choice,” she said.

Feasting on Feedback

Stine admits she and the board learned a great lesson when making their initial presentation to the member-owners. “It was too much information,” she said, noting member-owners were overwhelmed by the process that included lobbies, laundry areas, basements and management offices. “We thought we were showing them a kind of concept that would go out over years, and they thought too many decisions had already been made without their input.” Extremely grateful for the feedback, the board took a step back and decided it was just as important to communicate to the owner-members and get their buy-in as it was to adhere to history and make everything beautiful. Recalling to the unfortunate carpet issue mentioned in the press, Stine realized that “everyone focuses around carpet…in my career I’ve always noticed that it’s a big decision, so we narrowed things down to just the carpet, and knew once people understood that, other decisions would be much easier,” she explained.

Surveys, workshops and focus groups soon followed, replete with old Westchester photographs strategically placed in elevators (part of the education process) and image boards on easels that reflected carpet patterns like damask or Moorish, along with color palettes, and explanations of the design concepts behind each pattern. For example, the concept behind the Moorish pattern was interpreted as “elements found in our architecture such as the porte-cochere - inspired by existing wrought iron details in entry gates, railing and grilles.” Additionally, every household received five dots they could spend in any way they wanted, Stine said, “…the dots showing the strength of their preferences.” Describing the process as “fascinating,” she said it was done over two days where residents visited the image boards, sometimes repeatedly, and got to inquire of the board about why things were done the way they were. They conferred with their neighbors, their families, and as a community, and then each household applied its dots to what it liked best. (Moorish won!)

Casting an eye to sustainability, Stine noted that the original concept was to replace carpeting with stone, but that the cost was determined to be prohibitive. To that end, she said member-residents were also concerned about overall funds, thinking they would be charged a special assessment for any changes to public spaces. Another town hall meeting addressed the issue. The chosen carpet will come from South Africa, it will be made of durable wool and nylon, on a green pad with low-or no-VOC adhesives, and have a projected 25-year lifespan.

With work scheduled to begin in July, and paint and upholstery choices on deck in its town hall design process, Stine said that The Westchester board – which also appointed resident committees for the project – is fortunate to have distinguished members of the architecture, design and communications industries on those committees. “We have so much (resident) talent and commitment here. We’d go on trips to the design center,” she recalled, affirming “you couldn’t buy” this kind of personal investment.