Serene Sensibility

Like many renovations, it started with something small. After 23 years, homeowners Cathy Simon and David Kuney had tired of their master bath, which sported an ’80s-era skylight that, as Simon puts it, “made the room feel like a sauna.” The couple contacted architect David Jameson, whose vision of a sleek, modern bath soon spilled over to encompass the adjoining closet, home office and master bedroom. As the detritus of years of day-to-day living melted away behind carefully planned storage built-ins and a new streamlined environment, the owners were smitten. “When I came upstairs,” Simon recalls, “my blood pressure went down.” The couple, both attorneys, decided they wanted to establish that sense of calm and serenity throughout their home. Five years later, the entire residence has been transformed into a spare, minimalist space full of subtle, deceptively simple, modern architectural elements that work together to form a cohesive whole. “The house is curated with just three or four materials,” Jameson says. He followed the design blueprint he established in the master suite, incorporating teak paneling on walls and ceilings, plate-bronze surfaces and expansive unfilled travertine fireplace surrounds into the rest of the house. Jameson’s repetition of materials brings unity to the home, which at nearly 6,000 square feet felt disjointed prior to the renovation. “The project was about taking an existing home and repositioning the way the rooms are experienced,” the architect explains. The number of rooms hasn’t changed—in fact, the footprint for the house remains exactly the same—but their configuration and orientation has. Jameson opened up some walls and closed off others, creating what he calls “a front-to-back relationship with rooms flowing together,” so sight lines are open from one end of the house to the other. He replaced rows of traditional windows with “window walls”—separate windows banked together without trim that reach from the floor up to the headers near the ceiling. The window banks are framed in teak to make each one look like a single, solid structure. The finished spaces are a perfect complement to the couple’s modern art collection—large abstract canvases that draw the eye throughout the house. The front entry, with a massive plate-bronze door and ceiling, opens into a spacious hallway that is empty of everything but artwork; bearing walls that couldn’t be moved have been widened to resemble art installations. The teak paneling, which includes quarter-inch reveals between panels, figures prominently on the walls and ceiling and flanks the stairwell at the end of the room.