A Home of One's Own

Cape Cod-based architect Doreve Nicholaeff enjoys a challenge. Because her resumé boasts a staggering array of 5,000-square-foot-plus luxury homes, she’s used to dealing with clients who demand nothing but the best. So how would she react when presented with a much more modest project—a tiny, one-story, 1950s traditional Cape Cod home that screamed out for attention? She’d done guesthouses bigger than this.

One small detail helped her decide to take on the renovation of the 800-square-foot house. She had just bought it. She and her young son would call it home as soon as she had transformed it from funky to fabulous.
What’s it like for an architect to be her own client? “It can be liberating, but it’s also a challenge,” says Nicholaeff. “You don’t have a client saying, ‘I like this, I don’t like this.’ So you have no limitations and you’re forced to have an almost constant—one-sided—conversation with yourself.”

The first topic of conversation was the scale of the new home. Because Nicholaeff felt the existing structure had “good bones,” she decided against tearing it down. “I knew I would have to add a two-story wing to get the space I needed,” she recalls. “But I wanted to preserve the cozy cottage feel of the home.” She was also concerned that a massive house would be too big for the small lot and out of place in the neighborhood. “I wanted to create something that respected the house’s traditional vernacular in detail, proportion and materials,” she explains.

She took her design cue from the home’s existing gables. She enlarged them and echoed them on the two-story addition. These ascending gables help to tie in the 1,200-square-foot addition and prevent it from overpowering the original house. “I didn’t want the huge gables that some homes have,” says the South African–born architect. “These helped the addition look like it grew, organically, from the existing structure; it still has intimacy.” A small decorative balcony that wraps around one of the gabled dormers also helps to scale down the two-story addition.

Did Nicholaeff succeed in keeping the cottage feel—and scale—she worked so hard to retain? Everyone who visits the 2,000-square-foot Osterville home seems to think so. “My friends call it the ‘enchanted cottage,’ ” she says with a grin.
With the exterior planned, Nicholaeff turned her keen eye for scale and proportion to the house’s interior. She was used to having to scale down her larger designs for her clients, but she had a completely different challenge here. “I needed to make the cottage interior appear bigger than it was, she says. “There are several tricks of the eye I played with to do that.”

The most striking trick was the way, as she says, she “borrowed space from one room to the next.” This use of enfilade, aligning doorways so that the eye is drawn from one room to another, is something of a trademark with the architect. “It is fascinating to see how, after you enter the front door, your eye is drawn through the entire house,” says Douglas Truesdale, senior project designer with Nicholaeff’s firm. “The spaces unfold from one room to the next and give the house a sense of flow.”

Nicholaeff has “borrowed space” nearly everywhere. Windows, doors, even a pass-through from the kitchen to the family room are precisely designed to align and draw the eye in all directions. Using dark-stained, quartersawn white oak for the floors throughout most of the house also adds to this inviting flow. “Enfilade is a simple idea but it works,” says Nicholaeff.
The architect gutted the interior of the existing house and raised the ceilings in the living room and dining room from a little more than seven feet to thirteen. She relocated an L-shaped kitchen at the axis of the old structure and the new addition to the bottom of the stairs. A pantry holds a toaster oven, microwave and butcher-block countertop; all can be hidden away when not in use. “I confess I hate clutter,” she says. “The only thing I ever have out on my kitchen counter is a coffee pot.”

Nicholaeff’s home office is also a testament to her love of order. Built-in cherry cabinets with sandblasted glass panel doors frame a sleep sofa that is backed by ceiling-to-floor cherry paneling. A built-in drafting table and shelving completes the cozy 12.5-foot-square room. “This office is very characteristic of Doreve’s designs,” says Truesdale. “It’s where form meets function and there’s a place for everything and everything in its place.”

A wall of built-in, painted poplar cabinets, drawers and shelving in the family room hides a television and stereo system. By continuing the built-ins all the way to the ceiling, Nicholaeff achieved the architectural, fitted look she was seeking. “This design gives the illusion that the unit is growing from the wall and makes the family room that much deeper,” she says. It is also an example of how scale and proportion can add warmth and coziness to a small home.

Nicholaeff’s second-story bedroom contains several examples of her attention to detail and scale. An elegant, curved-top wall niche serves as the perfect focal point for a Milton Avery lithograph. It also serves as a visual headboard for the bed. She has created a small sitting alcove, a cozy retreat ideal for reading a book, just off the bedroom. It is framed by a low wall that flows from the bed. “This is a house of intimate spaces,” says the architect, “and this is one of my favorites.”

So how did the architect and the client get along on this dramatic transformation? “No complaints,” says Nicholaeff. “In fact I am the happiest of clients and I am so in love with my house.”

ARCHITECTURE
Doreve Nicholaeff
PRODUCED BY
Stacy Kunstel