“Scope Creep” can happen to anyone. But normally when a renovation project begins modestly and ends up engulfing the entire house, the owners start tearing their–and sometimes their architect’s–hair out.
Not Bill Warner. When he and his wife, Elissa Edelstein-Warner, bought their 1929 federal-style house in Cambridge, Mass., in 1993, he was disappointed that it turned out to be in such good shape.
What, no rabbit warrens of unusable space to reconfigure? No eye-stopping low ceilings, rotten staircases or uneatable-in kitchen in urgent need of a rethink?
“The place was perfect,” Warner recalled. “It had been owned by lawyers, so there were even covers on the air-conditioners.” He was dejected.
But on the bright side, it did lack the family room the Warners needed. And at 3,300 square feet, the house was too small for the future (the couple have a 15-month old son and have plans for more children).
So the family room provided a ready excuse to start a two-year-long overhaul in which plans for a modest-enough addition expanded, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style, to include a new two-story mahogany-clad tower, a three-room master suite, a 14-foot-long central skylight, an all-new kitchen, underground swimming pool, heated garage and elevator. And there were some adaptations to make it all accessible for Warner’s wheelchair.
“This was Bill’s Big Adventure,” said Alex Anmahian, one of the architects. “It was a lifelong dream of his to renovate a house. And so every time we proposed something new, he’d say: `Go! Go do it!’ “
After a year in residence, Warner and his wife still sound slightly dazed.
“I never asked for it to be this nice,” Warner said. “I told Elissa that someone’s going to have to redesign us to fit here.”
Warner is an inventor who has never let the wheelchair he uses slow him down (he was injured in a car accident in his youth).
In 1987, he created Avid, a film-editing software program, which earned him an Oscar for engineering in 1994. A more recent project is Wildfire, an electronic telephone system that performs some functions of a personal secretary.
His wife, an inventor of a patented voice-controlled video game, is the founder of Interactives, a company specializing in voice-input technology.
While Warner was the more enthusiastic about embarking on a huge building project, the couple agreed on one thing: they wanted that rare and romantic entity, a house that would be for keeps, one that could weather the years, that would fit, as Warner said, “when we have a family full of little kids and when we don’t anymore.”
The Warners gave their architects, Anmahian and Nick Winton of Anmahian Winton Architects in Boston, a script to work from, a 25-page document in which they posed and then answered questions about day-to-day life, things like where they drink their morning coffee, where they really entered the house, and whether they would ever use more than one fireplace.
Anmahian recalled that from the start, the couple’s design criteria were communicated with an intensity and perception he had rarely encountered on the job,
“Bill would say something like, `That small window looks so sad–can’t you make it happier?’ “
The Warners had quite different approaches, but they complemented each other.
“He thought about the experiences he wanted to have,” Edelstein-Warner said. “I thought about uses.”
Warner added, “I had the big ideas–she wanted to move in as fast as possible.” In fact, once she had found the right neighborhood and the right house, Edelstein-Warner was satisfied–that is, until she thought about how nice it would be to have a sitting room looking out into the trees.
Thus, the plan for the family room off the kitchen turned into a tower with a second-floor, glassed-in sitting room adjacent to the new master bedroom.
“It’s small but looks out into so much space,” Edelstein-Warner said. “And in the spring when the leaves come out, it really feels like a treehouse.”
The addition is clad entirely in red mahogany painted with a slate-gray stain; against the brick of the rest of the house, the addition’s complicated pattern of walls and bays looks like an exotic structure built into a Tibetan cliff, not the new wing of a straight-laced New England house.
For Warner, it was the garage–the entrance the family uses most–that provoked special feelings.
“I want the lights in the garage to be fun,” he wrote in the script, “and to give a showroom feeling when you drive in.”
The garage also is Warner’s place to tinker with one of his favorite inventions, a hand-powered bicycle (for tooling around Cambridge on errands), so it is fully heated. And there is an electric door that slides up for the hand-cycle and wheelchair.
Most ingenious of all is a rolling pass-through drawer connecting to the adjacent kitchen, which is perfect for bringing in groceries.
Getting the lighting just right was a key issue for both the Warners.
“I want light without lighting,” Warner said. “To me, it’s crucial in a house to have a sense of what’s going on outside even if you’re in the basement.”
Scope creep spread in earnest with the design of a 14-foot-long skylight at the top of the central stairwell. Dormers and transoms everywhere insure that natural light penetrates every nook and cranny.
“My mother was from Iceland, where homes as a source of light and comfort are a revered tradition,” Edelstein-Warner said. “That’s the feeling I’ve tried to create everywhere I’ve lived but especially here, as this is our permanent home now.”
For the architects, making the house wheelchair accessible was an exercise in moving beyond disability cliches. Warner declared that grab bars and such other obvious institutional hardware should not be used.
“I have to get from here to there, but I want it to be fun,” Warner said.
An electronic ramp is one particularly clever feature. Actually, there are two ramps in one place: one leads from the garage up to the foyer, elevator and kitchen beyond. It also raises like a drawbridge to reveal a second ramp leading down to the basement with its swimming pool and workout room.
Warner chose a commercial-grade elevator because anything else would have been too noisy and too slow. He had also hoped the cab would have windows so it would feel “like a ride, not a box to ride in,” he said.
But building codes would not permit it. A consolation is that the cab’s smooth steel interior is perfect for magnets, making it the ideal family photo gallery. And the elevator, Warner pointed out, has “a surface capacity unmatched by four Sub-Zeros.” (This helped him get over his disappointment that magnets wouldn’t stick to the kitchen’s stainless-steel refrigerator.)
The kitchen counters are built low so that Warner can cook, but they also happen to be the perfect height for visitors to perch on (in the script, Warner made sure to ask for rounded edges that would be easy on the backs of the knees).
When the script was all played out and the Warners moved in, they invited two of the previous owners to a housewarming party.
Warner likes to recount how the son of a couple who had lived in the house more than 30 years ago went to his old bedroom and exclaimed, “This is where I grew up!”
That the entire side of the house had been torn down and that the bedroom had a new vaulted ceiling and only one original window didn’t seem to matter.
After two years of soul-searching and renovation, Warner says he is especially pleased by the way the house manages to meet new needs and still connect to the past. Though souped up from top to bottom, it is still the quiet family house with Yankee dignity that attracted the couple to it in the first place.
The key to the success of Bill Warner and Elissa Edelstein-Warner’s renovation was the script that described exactly how they wanted to use each room. It made sure the house was truly suited to them. And it didn’t cost a thing.
– The couple knew they wanted as much natural light in their house as possible. Their architects, Alex Anmahian and Nick Winton, devised a 14-foot-long and 4-foot-wide skylight that floods the interior with natural light.
– Convenience, not atmosphere, was the mother of an ingenious pass-through that the architects invented to make it easier to bring groceries from the garage to the adjacent kitchen. The technology and the parts are simple: Anmahian devised a horizontal dumbwaiter by cutting a square opening in the wall.
