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The Milwaukee Journal, May 19, 1991
Home Section: Design

[project portfolio page for this design]

Simple Beauty

Traditional and contemporary, home suits owners, neighbors

By Judith Knuth
Special to the Journal

Like a punk rocker at a symphony concert, a starkly contemporary house can add a jarring note to a suburban neighborhood of genteel Tudor manor houses, "Gone With the Wind" Southern colonials and French chateaux.

When Andrew Boer Architects was asked to design a contemporary house with an exteror that would "be a good neighbor" in a Brookfield subdivision of mostly traditional homes, principal architect Andrew J. Boer turned to a turn-of-the-century design style that anticipated many of the concerns of modern architecture.

"Arts and Crafts was a way for us to do something that was sympathetic to the rest of the neighborhood," Boer says. "We felt there was a lot of freedom to operate in that style."

Reaction to Victorian Design
Arts and Crafts architecture had its beginnings in a British reform movement in the second half of the 19th century. It arose as a reaction against the elaborate, machine-made furnishings and slavish historicism of the Victorian age.

The movement developed in diverse ways, but, in general, the architectural principles stress the need to suit a building to its site and to its occupants' needs. Arts and Crafts homes often are spare and simple, with an emphasis on the honest use of materials, and exposed, rather than concealed, construction details. The exterior takes it shape from the interior room layout and -- both structurally and in design details -- is marked by strong horizontal and vertical lines.

Within this style, Boer created a four-level, 7,000-square-foot house with two nearly opposite purposes: to comfortably accommodate his clients' frequent large gatherings, and to provide an inviting and intimate atmosphere for the daily life of a family of four.

Design in Zones
"Basically what we did was to divide the house in half. The south half -- the living room and dining room -- is primarily for friends and guests and they enter through the front door. The private half is the kitchen, dinette and and family room, and there's an entry from the garage."

The main entrance is enclosed by a long, low, overhanging roof supported by piers that are topped with the kind of squat, tapering posts found on many Milwaukee bungalows. It's somthing you don't see much anymore, Boer says, a true front porch, "an entry that really shelters guests."

There is a dramatic change as the visitor steps through the front door, passing from the confines of the porch and a vaguely rustic, painted and stained cedar exterior into the soaring, light-filled core of a very contemporary interior.

Two enormous exposed-brick chimneys flank a center stairwell. The chimneys rise up through the entire house, visible on every level, basement through loft.

A multistory west-facing window behind the stairway, and skylights overhead, flood the area with natural light. The stairway strives for transparency, with open risers and open railings -- backed with tempered glass -- that allow the unimpeded flow of light.

"In very large older homes," Boer says, "they always had a central area that you could stand in and comprehtend the major spaces of the home, have a sense of where the rooms were. The main entrance came in there and then there was the grand staircase to the second floor. I felt that this house, with its size, needed a space like that."

Boer says that while the broad outlines of the house, it siting and early style decisions are his, much of the credit for the finished details belong to the project architect, Paul Doperalski.

"Paul brought into the project the consistency between the interior and the exterior detailing. He was involved in all of the construction administration and all the working drawings."

Boer says many of the home's details can be traced to the work of architects who are acknowledged masters in the world of Arts and Crafts -- Scotland's design genius Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Charles and Henry Greene, pioneers of the elegant California bungalow.

One direct borrowing is the use of copies of Japanese-influenced lanterns designed by Greene and Greene as exterior lighting fixtures.

More subtle is Doperalski's consistent, and often sophisticated, use of squares as a design motif, a reflection of Mackintosh's own fascination with the square.

On the interior, squares mark the termination of the stair posts, create a pattern on the floor of the master bath, even add a surprising punch to the stark brick face of the fireplaces. On the exterior., squares painted a deep, brick red punctuate a neutral palette of grays and browns.

The owners have enthusiastically extended the motif with Mackinsoth-inspired chairs in the living room and dining room, and bold square-pattered bedspreads.

There's a consistent level of trim and detailing in the house, Boer says, "that rewards people who look closely."

The house boasts four bedrooms, five fireplaces, a state-of-the-art kitchen, and luxury features that make its $110 per-square-foot cost come as no surprise.

One extravagant extra is the swim spa, housed in a two story room a few steps down from the family room and a few steps up from the basement-level playroom. It features a small pool with constantly moving water that allows users to swim in place. Boer describes it as a "treadmill for swimmers".

Warm water circulates through plastic piping embedded in the spa room's concrete floor, keeping the room comfortably usable year-round (The same system is used in the home's basement rooms.) Humidity is controlled with airtight doors that close off the spa room from the rest of the house. And on the exterior wall, the spa opens onto its own deck.

The deck is part of an astonishing 2,100-square feet of multilevel deck space that, along with a 700-square-foot patio outside the basement playroom, make the outdoors accessible from virtually every room in the house.

Boer says that the interior space is extended not only literally by the decks and patio, but also visually. "No matter what window you look out of, you see part of the house."

One of Boer's earliest design decisions was to place the garage at the back of the house, a departure from conventional house plans in which the garage is often a major element of the street-facing facade.

"We didn't want a four-car garage staring people in the face as you approach the house. Instead of a big concrete apron in front, you have a slender driveway that comes in to the back of the house. Guests actually drive past the front door."

The homeowner wanted to keep the wooded lot as close to its natural state as possible, and Boer says the "tree rules" were so strictly enforced during construction that crews joked about the death penalty being enforced. The effort paid off, and even small trees, only 4 or 5 feet away from the house, survived. The mature growth underscores the integration of the house and site, Boer says, suggesting that the house has been there as long as the trees have.

Doperalski and Boer, both graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Architecture and Urban Planning, call the house a significant project and credit their client with both input and vision. "You don't have a lot of owners who will give you that much space to move around in," Doperalski says.

"What we wanted was a building that is very specific and oriented to the client. The intent was not to produce an Arts and Crafts-style building, but a building with its own identity. That's what the Arts and Crafts movement was really pursuing."