Craig and Valerie Dykstra have created a 14,900-square-foot custom home tucked into 45 wooded acres in Western Fairfax County that is loaded with character. What makes the strongest impression is not the massive stone walls, soaring glass windows, superb craftsmanship, magnificent landscape or sheer size of this house, although these do make indelible impressions. What’s magical is that this grand home also manages to reflect the personalities and humor of its owners.
Surprises wait around every corner. A secret interior slide, for instance, whisks guests from the first floor bar downstairs. One feels like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit’s hole and landing in a huge recreation room complete with a home theater, pool table, popcorn machine, Redskin-red walls and football-brown leather sofas. A miniature train chugs into a tunnel in a stone wall, travels the perimeter of the room, and emerges onto a lollipop-looped track behind the bar on the opposite side of the room.
In other parts of this unique house, a regulation racquetball court is complete with a water fountain, steam room and sauna. Cats carved in wood, a nod to the family’s four cats, are poised to pounce from the pergola. A book nook with a comfy reading chair includes shelves that are intentionally crooked. And most of the interior doors have glass marbles, the size of golf balls, playfully built into the design.
The Beginning
In 1997, the Dykstras set out to design an original house that would function above all else as a home for themselves and their daughters, Amy and Anne, who are now 14 and 11 respectively. They weren’t exactly sure what they wanted for their dream house, although they admired the architecture in the Northwest around Seattle. But they knew what they didn’t want.
“I didn’t want my house to be the kind of place where I’d have to say, ‘Don’t sit there and don’t touch that, ” says Valerie, 46. “Think about a center hall colonial and make it as different as you can,” Craig, 46, a retired AOL founder, recalls telling his architect, Jon Hensley of Jon Hensley Architects PLLC, who was later joined on the project by his partner Sunny Carroll. Richard Arentz of Arentz Landscape Architects LLC and Interior Designer Walter Gagliano of G&G Arte also collaborated closely with the family to create this modern masterpiece.
The Dykstras gave Hensley a four-page list of all the spaces they’d like to have in their house including a guest suite, two home offices, a lanai and a private apartment for Craig’s mother, Shirley, 80. Hensley hit the drawing board but wasn’t crazy about his initial plan.
“The plan was static and needed that energy,” Hensley says. “That energy” is what he created when he tossed big sweeping curves into his design. Exterior stone, wood and glass walls curve. An airy interior handmade banister curves. And like the yellow brick road, a 42-inch-wide granite walkway that spans from the living room through the foyer, family room and kitchen, curves. The level of craftsmanship in this house is exceptional.
“The way these curves are, they’ll go more than 100 feet in space and then meet within a sixteenth of an inch,” Hensley says. “For instance, consider the floating stair that joins the curved cantilevered balcony. There was a specific point in space where those two had to meet precisely and they met exactly.”
Six zones of fiber optic lighting feature four different types of fiber optic fixtures in the family room, which has a torqued roof. Two carpenters spent one month creating the ceiling, meticulously cutting the wood into slightly pie-shaped planks to accommodate the torque in the ceiling.
“It’s the simplicity that takes an enormous amount of effort to create,” Hensley says. “One of the challenges of designing this home was to break the large scale of the home into separate and distinct pieces that worked together.”
One of the ways he did this was by incorporating different materials. He used Western red cedar, Spanish cedar and fir, all stained the warm color of redwood, stoneyhurst fieldstone and bluestone, stucco and glass. Varying the scale of the different parts of the house and rotating the axis of the gym and garage wings helped, too.
Hensley integrated many strong architectural features to connect this stunning house to its beautiful site. A lanai in the back of the house, for instance, can be used four seasons of the year. Hensley designed this transitional space so that it can be open in the summer. Or, if the Dykstras prefer, they can press a button and screens automatically roll down to create a screened-in porch. As the weather gets colder, they can press another button and glass windows will enclose it completely. An indoor whirlpool can be concealed during the summer, when the family uses the outdoor whirlpool, and revealed in the winter when this space is heated.
A 13-foot-8-inch-high curved wall of windows, and other dramatic windows across the back of the house, draw a visitor outside where the water from a mesmerizing vanishing edge pool rushes over boulders and spills and splashes into a waterfall over a grotto and lower pool.
Arentz Took his Cues From the Land to Create his Design.
“The swimming pool was ultimately designed to resemble a quarry and was particularly exciting and inspired from the natural site indicators . . . i.e. the existing rock outcroppings and the stone that was blasted from the site to create the basement of the house,” Arentz says. Ninety percent of the boulders, rocks and stones that he melded into his landscape design were harvested from the site. Arentz faced huge challenges. He had to make sure that the pools were structurally sound and watertight, no small feat when dealing with massive boulders and different levels. The result is nothing less than spectacular.
A 14-ton boulder was brought in to provide a perfect perch for diving. Fiber optic lighting effects were custom designed by a company from London. A 30-foot-long sliding board was installed to meander over boulders and drop from the upper pool to the lower one.
An impeccable lower lawn invites even more recreation. There’s space to play croquet, bocce ball and horseshoes. Arentz drew further inspiration from the site and used indigenous plants including sourwood, ironwood, serviceberry and hay scented ferns. He selectively cleared one tree at a time to allow a distant view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and to create a visual easement to the sky in an otherwise heavily wooded site. The seamless blending of the inside and outside makes this space feel like a sanctuary.
“The challenge for me was to create a piece of outdoor art that’s going to last as long as possible,” Arentz says.
“I’ve never been a very outdoorsy person, but Richard’s designs make you feel like you want to go outside,” Valerie says. “I really enjoy entertaining and having guests enjoy our house. That’s one of my favorite things. With the pool, it’s so easy. They come, the kids get their bathing suits on, and the rest takes care of itself.” She adds that for the most part, the rooms of the house are water-friendly and impervious to wet bodies.
Comfy Furniture
Interior Designer Walter Gagliano collaborated closely with the Dykstras to furnish their home. Eye-catching pieces include three Logico chandeliers nestled together in the dining room that suggest a cloud, a pale blue glass spiral cocktail table by Cattlelan Italia and a seafoam-shaded Bilboa sofa that is a swoop of a shape in the music room/living room.
Gagliano designed a 22-foot-long curved sofa that is just the right proportion for the movie theater. When it arrived, however, the pillows were so over-stuffed, that there was hardly room to sit, except on the edge of the sofa. They immediately had some of the stuffing removed.
“Really cool furniture is all well and good, but if it’s not comfortable, we don’t want it,” Craig says.
In a rare move that more designers should emulate, Gagliano left plenty of spaces for the Dykstras to fill as they travel and acquire new treasures. This is part of what makes this house feel so personal. They’ve added a delightful small table in their guest suite, for example, that features inlaid wooden tiles that seem to spill off of one edge. “The artist calls it a Humpty Dumpty table, because some of the tiles had a great fall,” Craig says. Gagliano was also deeply involved in the kitchen design and the instigator of the karaoke stage in the basement.
Childhood Revisited
Craig wanted his office to feel like an old attic because as a boy, he’d shared a bedroom with his brother and when he wanted space of his own, he’d escape to the attic. He eventually moved up there, despite the fact that it would get incredibly hot in the summer and cold in the winter. “I didn’t care, I loved it, because it was mine,” he says. To recapture a bit of an attic atmosphere, he had his office built on the top floor of his house, and had an antique wide-planked fir floor installed instead of using maple, which is used for flooring throughout much of the house.
A pair of “potato chip” chairs, as the family calls two modern swivel chairs in his office, offers tranquilizing views of the mountains through the top floor of a three-story tower of windows. These Mondrian-inspired windows feature mitered glass corners à la Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
And since Craig had always been fascinated with widow’s walks and rooftop decks, Hensley created a “rain room” in the center of his office. “We decided to put an exterior door down here and once you step through, you’re outside,” Craig says.
This cylindrical glass exit encloses a metal spiral staircase that leads to a rooftop deck above his office. When it snows, Craig can watch snowflakes fall right down to the floor just a few feet from his desk. Or he can step outside and feel the brisk, fresh air.
With the sublime architecture, landscape, interiors and firm fingerprint of its family, it’s no surprise that the Dykstra project was presented a Fairfax County Exceptional Design Award in October. And no doubt kids of all ages would judge this to be one of the most magical of all homes to play in anywhere.
