1800ft2, Washington DC, 2015

Best Foot Backward - 

As a building typology, the townhouse suffers from front-back schizophrenia. Some have a street-centric presence, front porches and stoops that encourage hanging about. Others are socially awkward up front but have interesting interior lives, and, ideally, private space in the back that makes up for the inability to relate up front. 

These differences reflect the social prerogatives of the time they were built. Our townhouse project in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington DC is a perfect example of the introverted townhouse. It was built in 1978, in the midst of the Carter Administration, when Washington DC was the murder capital of the nation and the city was in the final throes of post-war white-flight. 

Our townhouse was built in a moment of optimism, part of a program to provide new housing stock in neighborhoods where the people who could afford new homes were looking for them in leafy suburbs. It was a townhouse built to compete with the cul-de-sac rambler. Despite its central city location, its first priority was the car. It’s second priority was security, and its third priority was, well, a sunken living room. 

With its one car garage dominating its front facade, and predicable, derivatively historicist fenestration, the townhouse  has an uninviting street presence. Walk up the front steps and into the parlor floor, and you find a house struggling to be two things: residual victorian notions of the division of space based on divisions of gender and labor are fighting hard with 1970s Free To Be You and Me. An almost open kitchen divides the sunken living room from a quasi-formal dining area.

Yanking this property into a more contemporary mode will take several steps. Our first is to blow the kitchen open. Our second is to leave only walls that have more function than just dividing things. Eventually the street presence and rear yard will need to be addressed, but that will be in future phases.