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As a specialist in home automation and an amateur DJ, David Sylvester is an expert in sound – from the music he loves to play to the technology that makes it heard throughout a house.
In that regard, there’s a connection between him and the man who commissioned the house where Sylvester and his wife now live. The late Dr. W. Proctor Harvey was considered the nation’s leading expert in listening to the sounds of the heart to detect its various ailments – a skill developed from his great sensitivity to music.
“My original client was a mentor to practically every doctor in town,” says Architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen, who designed Harvey’s McLean, VA, house. Harvey created an entire library of heart sounds at Georgetown University’s medical school, where he spent more than 50 years as a cardiologist and professor. The school has a teaching amphitheater – fully automated with the latest technology – that is named after him.
Sylvester and his wife, Kara Heitz, purchased the Harvey house less than three months after Dr. Harvey died in 2007. His widow, Irma Harvey, was persuaded to sell it to them instead of another bidder because of a long letter they wrote to her, professing their love for modern design and pledging to preserve Jacobsen’s work.
And there lies the second connection between the two owners of this unique house – a mutual passion for great architecture.
The Harveys approached Jacobsen in 1970 to design their house in a wooded area of McLean that was virtually undeveloped at the time. “It was the first house in that whole area to be built,” Jacobsen says. “No house had ever come in its way.”
The task at hand was to design a space that was filled with light, in spite of the trees’ heavy shade.
“I was always consumed right from the very beginning with the unique qualities of light,” Jacobsen says, “how to capture that light in the middle of the woods was a great act.” The solution was to create continuous glass panes on top of the house that could capture the light and bounce it within the house. “You had to have light to get inside those huge spaces. Otherwise, it’d be quite dreary.”
Jacobsen designed slots in the upper walls so light from the top windows would spread everywhere. He also designed glass bump-outs from some rooms so light could come into the house through the sides.
The house is also an example of Jacobsen’s philosophy that structures – like people – should not divulge their treasures all at once.
“The front door must say, ‘it’s better on the inside than it is on the outside,’ ” Jacobsen says. In this house, the double doors flanked by wide glass panes are inviting, but upon entering, a visitor can’t immediately see beyond the back wall of the double chimneys.
“You don’t deliver it right away,” Jacobsen says, with a hint of coyness in his voice. Look in either direction from the entry, though, and the bluestone floor leads to steps on each side of the chimneys that lead down to the living room. Turn the corner and down the steps, Jacobsen says, “and then you begin to understand.” The walls suddenly shoot 23 feet upwards. The light from the top clerestory windows floods the space. A wall of windows on the other side has sliding doors that open to a sprawling deck that overlooks two acres of forest with a stream running through it.
“Every house has to have a ‘Jesus Christ!’ moment,” Jacobsen explains. “You go around to this living room,” he says, and there it is.
Dr. Harvey’s real prize, however, was his treetop office, reached via a bright orange spiral staircase. According to a 1972 article in House Beautiful magazine, he told Jacobsen he had always wanted “a place where I can look out right into the trees. A place I can spread my papers, or even lie down. I find I do some of my best thinking flat on my back.”
A generation later, Kara Heitz uses the same aerie to contemplate and write her dissertation on the intersection of politics and popular culture as she pursues a Ph.D. in politics at The George Washington University.
The orange pop of that staircase is still visible from the entry hall today – yet another promise of better things to come. The young couple repeated the effect on the other side of the hall, with a new spiral staircase leading up to Sylvester’s office – a space that was unfinished until they bought the house. Orange accents in new office create a connection with the other side.
“It just gets better everywhere you go inside,” Jacobsen says of the intent of his design. With the renovation, Sylvester and Heitz made sure his statement holds true.
