Rural restraint: preserving that country feeling

Custom Home, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Bruce D. Snider

When custom builder Guy Semmes directs clients to his company's office in Potomac, Md., he tries to steer them around the more gruesome patches of mini-mansion sprawl that have cropped up nearby. It gets harder all the time. A recent New York Times story fingered this once-rural suburb of Washington, D.C., as one of the country's prime breeding grounds for what it termed monster houses: gaudy, super-size residences beached on featureless 2-acre lots like ocean liners run aground. "I don't know how architecture got so bad," laments Semmes, who finds the situation both embarrassing--he's a builder in this town, too, after all--and painful, because he grew up nearby on a 100-acre farm much like those falling to monster-house developments. He blames misguided planning for the plague of sprawl. "Potomac's 2-acre zoning concept is a failure" he says.

Semmes knows because he has seen an alternative that works. This house is one of 12 custom homes that Semmes's company, Hopkins & Porter Construction, has built in Merry-Go-Round Farm, a development that turns many of Potomac's subdivision conventions upside down. Rather than carpet farmland with the maximum allowable number of 2-acre lots, this one carves out half-acre lots at the margins of the property--the most difficult sites on which to build--leaving the bulk of the land as common space. Rather than adopt a rigid set of style guidelines, this one maintains an enlightened design review that stresses architectural integrity. "You can build anything in there, as long as it's true to the style," Semmes says.

And rather than reduce the ancestral farm to a quaint name on the entry gate, this one preserves it as both a working concern and an amenity for the residents. "It's like a golf community," he says, "but instead of a golf course, there's a working equestrian farm."

The idea grew out of developer Tyler Abell's search for a way to preserve his own family farm. "The zoning would have allowed him 80 houses out there," Semmes explains. "He said, `Listen, give me the 80 houses, but I'll put them on half an acre or 1 acre and we'll save 160 acres of the farm.'" With extraordinary tenacity, Abell convinced reluctant planning authorities to approve his development and saved the farm.

Run as a for-profit enterprise, the farm provides a living context in which to ground a neighborhood of homes. That kind of authenticity is a rare quality in Potomac subdivisions, and one that architects Anne Decker and Jim Rill relish. "The open spaces, the trees, the barns are all kept intact," says Decker. In the design process, "It allows you to be more responsive to the surroundings." The immediate surroundings of this house are a wooded lot that slopes to a shallow ravine and seasonal watercourse, just the kind of land that would have been left fallow in a typical subdivision plan (drainage on this site required a dry well 16 feet square and 16 feet deep). "The easier parts" Decker notes, "would have been the pastures, where you wouldn't have to deal with the trees or the topography."

Here, she says, those features led the way. "The driving forces were the view of the pasture across the way and the backdrop of trees to the rear." Decker framed views of the pasture with traditional divided-sash windows whose proportions recall the property's original farm buildings. The house reflects those agricultural roots also in its massing, materials, and colors: a wide porch with a low-pitch metal roof; deep, bracketed overhangs; stone and board-and-batten walls; whitewashed surfaces. The straightforward massing, Decker says, reflects her desire "to have the outside read truly to what's happening on the inside."

That unpretentious approach yields a deceptively simple plan. The flagstone floor of the front porch continues into the entry foyer, where it serves as something of a navigational aid to first-floor circulation. To the left, it leads to the master bedroom wing; to the right, the kitchen wing, with utility spaces beyond. Mapping directly onto the foyer from above is a stair hall that serves a pair of bedrooms over the master suite and a guest room over the kitchen wing. The same general template also organizes the lower level, which holds a walk-out recreation room, an extra bedroom, and accessory spaces.

But if the plan opts for logic over mystery, it also finds room for drama. At the heart of the house is a voluminous living/dining room that opens to the backyard forest with a two-story window wall. "It really reaches toward the trees," Decker says. Even here, though, the house maintains its ties to the farm. The room itself has "the loftiness of barns," she says, and the coffered ceiling suggests the bays of a post-and-beam frame. The second-floor railing uses a steel mesh manufactured for the homely job of screening gravel. Appropriate to the barn-like space, the stone chimney is monumental in scale but plain in form and humble in material.

Such plainspoken grace is refreshing in a suburb where houses glutted with square footage aim for comfort but often overshoot their mark. This is a house--and a housing development--that honors and elevates simple things, some of which have nothing at all to do with houses. A few of them can be seen grazing not far away.