At the top of a magnificent 1916 historic building, an exemplar of early twentieth-century Beaux-Arts architecture, sits a 5000-square-foot apartment with panoramic exposures of the vistas of the Washington, D.C. landscape. Our clients wanted a reconfiguration that would take full advantage of the stunning views while maintaining full fidelity to the building’s architectural heritage. Harkening back to monumental forms to emphasize the apartment’s splendor, we designed a harmonious Greek cross entry hall –  with marble slabs set in a wood frame, a coffered ceiling, and paneled surfaces to provide framed areas for the owner’s extensive art collection – to initiate the spatial journey through this remarkable apartment. The hall opens to a central gallery that originally ended unceremoniously at each end with low doors opening to warren-like passages leading to corner bedrooms. We extended the gallery length to 46 feet, creating an elegant double-apsed hall, pierced with passages leading directly to the new dining room with its vista of the Washington Monument to the south and to the new library at the north end with its view of the National Cathedral. Graced with plaster columns, beams, an extraordinary crown molding, a new chevron-patterned oak flooring, and a newly vaulted ceiling finished with reflective Venetian plaster and bathed in light from an invisible cove behind the crown molding, the gallery creates a grand centrifugal core. The gallery not only offers an organizing principle for the new public spaces, including a chef’s kitchen on the south end and the private spaces off the library on the north end, but also signals the elegance and grandeur of this apartment atop a historic building with the magnificence of our nation’s capital visible beyond.

Photography by Gordon Beall