We decided, before we started with the transformation of Cedar Crest, that we would be smart to hire an architect. We didn't want to renovate one part of the house only to find out a year or two later that we had to re-renovate it to accommodate some other part of the project. The most sensible thing to do seemed to be to focus on the the big picture - and proceed in steps - phases - until Cedar Crest is complete. This would hopefully alleviate any chances of knocking down a wall that we would later discover we needed. So we asked around and found the name of a local architect who had done previous work with renovating and remodeling old houses. We also knew of a couple of new constructions that he had designed and we had really liked them. So, we called Vincent DenHartog and asked if he would meet with us. We also mentioned that Cedar Crest was a Leslie Fairn house and I think that heightened his curiousity. We hit it off immediately. If you'd like to see some of Vincent's other work, check out his website:
http://www.denhartogarchitect.com/
We met with Vincent on a couple occasions and chatted about our lifestyle and our likes and dislikes and basically just how we lived. We had kept a scrapbook with lots of design ideas and we passed that on to him too. He and Dan, his architectural technologist, came and took some pictures of the property and went to work on the renovation of the main house (mainly kitchen and downstairs bathroom - the rest just will just have some interior design work) and the big project - the conversion of the barn into living space. He called last week and told us he was ready to meet with us to show us some preliminary computer generated pictures of some ideas he had. He came over at 7:00, set up his computer and rolled out some rolled up sketches across the dining room table and then proceeded to show us what they'd come up with.
We loved it!! There will be some fine tuning but, for the most part, this is very close to what we envision Cedar Crest to become. Here are a couple of the pictures he showed us. If you look at some of the "before" pictures in earlier blog posts you can see where the changes are going to happen.
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| The large windowed wall of the barn will look out over the gardens. |
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| The large "lantern" on top of the barn is actually about 8'x8' and visible from the road. |
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| The courtyard between the house and barn will have some boxwoods and small kitchen gardens for herbs. |
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| In "real life" this view is actually obstructed by trees and shrubs but it does start to give a sense of the scale of the project. |
