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The dream began when Lavinia Fici Pasquina and husband Paul Pasquina were bicycling through a residential neighborhood in Bethesda, MD, and saw a rundown home for sale. “It was a teardown,” Lavinia remembers, mentioning the leaky roof and woefully neglected interiors of the 1,100-square-foot ranch house, built in 1949. “It was in such bad shape, we couldn’t even get financing. But as awful as it was, when I walked in, I saw beauty. I thought, ‘This is something to preserve,’ ” says Lavinia, who has master’s degrees in architecture from both The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and the University of Palermo in Sicily, where she grew up. Paul, chief of the Integrated Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at Walter Reed, shared her vision that the house could be saved and transformed.
“My goal was to be green,” says Lavinia, who respected the rancher and gave it new life by integrating it into a soaring two-story, 4,000-square-foot modern work of art. The magic of her creation is that she accomplished all this while increasing the footprint of the original house by just 300 square feet on the east side. With so many floor-to-ceiling windows and translucent panel walls, the addition seems almost transparent. “The idea of the house was to bring the outdoors inside,” the young architect says.
Designed for Living
“I designed the space around moments, not square footage. There’s a moment for relaxing, a moment for cooking, hallways for transition – it’s a synthesis of who I am,” says Lavinia, director of digital media at Catholic University. She collaborated with her friend, Architect Frederick Liwanag, on architectural drawings, and her sister, Natalia Fici, her partner in the design company Xhabition, on the interior design.
As she was designing, Lavinia, who also served as general contractor, sat in the grass by the edge of the property studying the sun’s path to figure out the best angle of the overhangs to shade the sunroom during the summer and permit enough sunlight in to warm the space during the winter.
She designed a copper roof shaped like wings in flight to capture rainwater that drains through a twostory spout into a catch basin surrounded by smooth black river rocks. A low-voltage wire keeps the roof at 40 degrees, which melts ice and snow. “No matter what, I always have water going into the downspout,” she says. The water is then recycled through coils for the radiant heat that warms the concrete floors. The V-shaped roof is angled for solar panels to be added in the future.
In the sunroom, Lavinia preserved the original chimney and converted it into a showcase/table by closing up the fireplace and adding a glass top. Inside, she displays exotic handmade textiles from Dubai and chunky silver jewelry she designed.
Industrial Look, Sustainable Living
The translucent walls Lavinia specified are two layers of fiberglass with Nanogel insulation, made by Kalwal, in between. They invite natural light in, saving energy by minimizing the need for artificial light. “And my walls are R20,” she says, referring to the measure of resistance to heat flow. “Average brick walls with insulation are only R19. The Nanogel stays the same temperature no matter what changes there are in [external] temperature.” Positioning the panels with the metal frames running horizontally gives the space a calm, Asian feel.
Lavinia, who likes loft living, wanted to celebrate and expose the structure and materials of the house such as concrete and steel. “Concrete can look like marble,” she says, adding, “I sandblasted all my steel and coated it with Tnemec, a very resistant paint for outdoor/exposed steel.” She eschews doors, so she installed sliding panels to privatize areas instead. The metal stairs, lead to sleeping quarters upstairs and a newly-installed, below-ground garage downstairs. Lavinia prefers neutrals for her furnishings, sparked by colorful accents.
Vacationing at Home
The arresting nature of the home’s exterior frequently slows drivers down. “It’s almost as if we have two speed bumps in front of the house,” Paul says.
Lavinia, frustrated by the trend toward tearing down older homes and replacing them with McMansions, says, “There is space for everybody. Why do cookiecutter houses?”
A few visitors have commented that a dramatic house like hers should be a second home, a vacation house sited on 10 acres instead of less than a quarter acre. Lavinia asks, “Why do people want to make a vacation home where you spend two weeks of the year? Why not make a home where you can have a vacation every day?”
