Old Georgetown, Powder room warm colors

"Glenwood Residence was conceived as a dream of the design and development group of creating a spec home a little bit different than what the market offers. The project involves a custom, unique home with well thought design ideas and materials kept within an accessible budget. Even before starting with the design and after long meetings with the realtors, we came with a scope suitable for the potential clients according to the location, lot, proximities, etc.

The result of months of planning, design and construction is a spacious new home near downtown Bethesda with 6 bedrooms and 4.5 baths. It maximizes space, light and energy efficiency for convenient, flexible, modern and comfortable living. The house was conceptually conceived as a cube/prism that would shelter a family, windows and siding were designed to reinforce the verticals. Inside a central spine, would organize the space. Symmetry, fluidity and balance between the 3 different levels where key in the design process. The cube would have two main connections to the exterior. First a wood portal that would mark and emphasis the main threshold into the house. Second, a terrace on the first floor what would allow entertaining and family circulation to flow inside-out.

The basement includes a mudroom, machine room a multi-use room. Also, separated by a door what can be configured as office/in-law apartment/rental unit. This includes a living area with kitchen, 2 bedrooms, full bathroom, a laundry closet with hook-ups for stacked laundry machines, it even has its one access to a private beautiful brick patio. During the planning and design process we went back and forth with Montgomery county lineaments. Issues like the area of the house, amount of levels, drainage requirements caused changes in the project.

Other of the challenges was to do more for less, budget-wise; so we came up with the idea of using more design and less “special/expensive” materials that would give us a good balance.

When we started the project we agreed not to do a garage, but leave the space under the deck as a carport. By the time we were about to pour the slab, the realtor called saying that we do need a car garage for two cars! So we had to adjust the project in no time to accommodate the garage, we stretched a bit the back and carved a bit from the basement to make room for two cars; we also added the driveway, extended for the cars to turn back and a drywell at the bottom to capture most of the rainwater.

Because of design and layouts adjustments, we started later in fall which took us into a very challenging and tough early winter to complete the envelope to work inside during the winter months. We wanted to create an open plan in the first floor but we designed the stairs in the middle to minimize circulation area and using the back of the stairs for HVAC trunks and closets. So we created two big openings on the sides which we closed with tempered glass to be able to see through and allow light to flow.

We used the coat closet in the first floor to hide the open kitchen behind and give some privacy to the entrance of the powder room.

Instead of building a portico, we carved the entry space into the volume of the house to reinforce the idea of a clean prism.