Hockey House

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Q&A with Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. ArchitectsBy Beth Herman
Because of a contemporary mom’s burgeoning interest inprofessional hockey, predicated on a Washington Capitals'championship season, the cramped first floor of a late 1970s 2,800 s.f. residence inPotomac, Maryland, underwent a significant reorganization. The goal was for clientadvantage in viewing much-anticipated games on the family’s flat screen TV fromthe kitchen and other points. With a few strategic slap shots, Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects broughther game plan home.
DCMud: Describethe home’s interior and some of the challenges for you in opening it up to the spacethat featured the TV.
Wilkoff: Thehouse was dated and compartmentalized—no open flow from space to space. Therewas a convoluted access to get from the garage and entrance foyer into thekitchen through a series of corridors, and a tight breakfast room. The kitchenwas landlocked in the back corner of the house. There was also a very smallfamily room that was adjacent to the kitchen but not contiguous to it in anyway: You still had to go through the breakfast room, through a corridor, backinto the hall, past the laundry room to get to the family room.
DCMud: Werethere any prior renovations at all?
Wilkoff: Thekitchen had been redone about 15 or 18 years ago and had held up well, but itwas claustrophobic. A built-in computer desk in the corridor between thebreakfast room and main entrance hall wasn’t used, becoming just a catch-allfor things. It wasted a lot of square footage.
DCMud: So howdid 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 werenot going to add a single square foot to the house—everything was being donewithin the existing footprint. I might add thatthough the dining room had a cathedral ceiling, it was also not spacious. Infact 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 -- atypical ‘70s detail where you have a half-height drywall partition up to a woodcap handrail. It had some bold forms but also closed everything in. There wasno sense of a vision beyond the space of those walls. A balcony over the foyerthat overlooked the dining room had that same detail, so we cut out all ofthose drywall handrail walls down to the stringers of the stairs and landings,and put in a stainless steel cable rail design which opened everything updramatically 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 newcorridor that went from the entrance foyer to the family room, but we put it ata 15-degree angle. This allowed us to steal more space out of the family roomto make it almost four feet wider—to use all of those (haphazard) corridors asa single corridor within this angle. We opened a giant peninsula from the newkitchen to the family room. There was also an over-sized powder room off ofthese old corridors. It had been dead space at the time, so they’d made thepowder room really big and the laundry room as well. We reconfigured the powderand laundry rooms to a more typical size. In this way, we were able to stealanother 18 inches of that old space and make the family room 18 inches widerone 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 dealof wasted space into the two new living spaces—and the hockey mom clientachieved 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 porcelainceramic tile—floor-to-ceiling—for a more dramatic feel. And it created anentrance portal into these spaces, so you feel like you are going through atransitional space. Some AV cabinets were built into the corridor with the samewood used on the kitchen cabinets. The same cabinet detailing was echoed in thedining 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 remotecontrolled gas unit. We took the huge wall between the fireplace and the kitchen’snew end windows and put the big flat screen TV on it. It’s centered between thefamily room and kitchen, so anywhere you are in that space, the focus is on theTV.

DCMud: A real game changer. And speaking of focus, what D.C. building would you say has inspired you the most as anarchitect?
Wilkoff: I grew up watching Italian craftsmen hand carving stone on the lawn of thesoon-to-be National Cathedral. It was old world craftsmanship that is gonetoday. There were tents on the Cathedral’s front lawn that sheltered theseworkers all along Wisconsin Avenue as they carved gargoyles and numbered stonesgoing into this gorgeous building. It left a huge impression.

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