Washington, D.C.-based architect Allan
Greenberg knew the task would be herculean when he embarked on the
restoration of this historic American Colonial. Owned by the same family
for more than 200 years, the Alexandria, Virginia, house is one of the few
freestanding residences in Old Town. Everyone -- members of the original
family, the new owner (Greenberg's client), the neighbors, and local
preservationists -- would scrutinize his changes.
But Greenberg, called the "most serious practitioner of classicism currently on the
scene" by Yale University art history professor George Hersey,
embraced the challenge. "Anyone can take an old building and put a
new building beside it," he says, "but to get the two buildings
to talk to one another is much more difficult." He succeeded
marvelously, designing a house whose old and new parts converse as freely
as family.
Greenberg began the project with a meticulous
exterior restoration. To determine what the house looked like when it was
built -- a few years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified -- his
expert team peeled away layers of siding and roofing that had been added
over years. The lucky discovery of a single original roof shingle suggested
that the shingles were wooden, scalloped, and painted red -- the color of
Washington's roof at Mount Vernon.
And when archaeologists determined
that the ornate Victorian entry porch (nice, but anachronistic) had
replaced a simple, asymmetrically placed raised platform, Greenberg removed
the porch and restored the platform. Each well-researched step helped erase
two centuries' worth of haphazard remodeling, giving the once-muddled
house an appearance that Greenberg calls "austere, simple, and very
robust."
