Salo Levinas blurred the boundaries between inside and outside his family’s home when he converted a 1946 typical brick colonial into an award-winning avant-garde design of stone, glass, and wood.
“My intention was to transform the house because it’s mine, not to cover the existing house, but to explode and explore something new I could bring to the space,” says Levinas, who lives here with his wife, Randi, and their three daughters, Joelle, Mihal, and Talia.
Levinas, Milton Shinberg, and Antonio Vintro, his partners at the architectural firm Shinberg Levinas LLC, left the front southwest corner of the Bethesda, MD, house intact. Then they opened it dramatically in the front and back, extending the dining room by 7’ and adding a two-story wing in the back that houses the kitchen, breakfast nook, and great room on the first floor, and the owners’ suite upstairs. The design, which enlarged the house from 1,534 square feet to 2,844, won a national award for small projects last year from The American Institute of Architects.
Form Follows Function
Levinas designed the distinctive front of the house, pictured opposite above, to include a curved wooden structure reminiscent of the bow of a ship, a sculptural boulder that anchors the house, and a roof that looks like a spinnaker upswept by wind.
“The ceiling is a continuation from inside, like I’m trying to reach outside. We had to custom shape each beam. When you see it, it kind of looks like it’s floating, because there are no columns,” Levinas says of the roof. The massive boulder hints at where the entrance is. Levinas purposely created an approach to his house on a 45 degree angle rather than a more direct approach. “This piece from the outside penetrates the inside,” Levinas says of the boulder. He didn’t want the dining room, which has two glass walls, to be instantly visible to visitors approaching from the street. So he added the boulder-style structure to obscure the dining room as you enter the front door.
A Journey
Levinas’ house provides a series of discoveries. “The idea is to have an experience; it’s like a journey. You discover step-by-step the different feelings of the house and get surprised continuously between one space and another,” he says. “The idea of a journey is more interesting than just opening the door and seeing the whole thing. Little by little getting into the house is much more entertaining.” Once inside, past the boulder, which is made of concrete, wood, plaster, and cement, a glance into the dining room reveals an undulating series of sycamore panels that actually turn out to be doors to a china closet. On the other side of the front door, the inside of Levinas’ bow-shaped design is a coat closet. The small, original living room, which now features a limestone fireplace surround and a bi-level orange coffee table in a seating vignette, connects to the light-filled great room, pictured above.
“I wanted a seamless connection to our backyard, we love to dine outside, so we have big sliding doors,” Levinas says, discussing the great room. An intriguing stone wall on one side touches glass on two edges. Levinas wanted a slit of a window at the top to allow sunlight in, but not a view into his neighbor’s yard. A curved breakfast nook of Brazilian ironwood cuts into floor-to-ceiling glass along the back of the house. This echoes the wooden structure in the front and creates a private, intimate area for the family to dine. Just beyond lies Randi’s favorite part of the addition, the spacious, minimalist kitchen with its fresh Dancing Green wall.
The new kitchen provides four times as much space as the original, which has become a butler’s pantry that connects the kitchen and dining room. “We like to entertain and have people over. We have Shabbat dinner every week, sometimes at Salo’s brother’s house, sometimes here. We can have 14 for dinner at this table,” says Randi, vice president of the US-Russia Business Council, gazing at the long rosewood dining room table.
Upstairs, in the new owners’ suite, Levinas continues the dialogue between the front and back of his house. The bedroom roof sweeps upward and outward. Large windows invite in lovely light. A freestanding 8’ x 10’ wooden box with walls that do not reach all the way to the ceiling in the center of the suite is actually a walk-in closet. The bathroom features water resistant marine mahogany walls, a glass shower, a sunken whirpool tub with a floor-to-ceiling window at one end, and floors made of recycled wood chips mixed with cement, like those in the great room.
Overall, Levinas says, “We’re trying to have a modern house with a warm feeling.”
