A Design House to Die For

David Benton of Rill Architects replaced the old front door with French doors that he painted a green/blue to signal that the home was traditional but was being treated in a contemporary manner. The paint color is Pond Shimmer by C2; C2 is the paint sponsor for the house. The entry garden was created by D & A Dunlevy Landscapers. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

The foyer and stairwell to the house bring modern color to a house with traditional “bones,” done by the always-colorful Camille Saum with Whitney Hansen. The ceiling here and throughout the stairwell is C2’s Viburnum green. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

Designer Marika Meyer added wainscoting to the walls of the dining room so that the painted paneling would add some architecture to what had been a very plain everyday dinner spot for the family. Meyer used durable indoor-outdoor fabric on the chairs and made sure the distressed walnut table could stand up to daily use. The 22-karat gold-leaf chandelier is a vintage find. The gray-and-white wallpaper is from China Seas. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

Kelley Proxmire mixed styles in the 1920s living room and updated the built-in cabinets on the far wall with white silk fabric behind the metal grating. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

Victoria Sanchez designed a casual and cozy family room adjacent to the kitchen in the 2014 DC Design House. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

Designer Victoria Sanchez. / Photo by Nancy McKeon.

Nestor Santa-Cruz worked with the family library’s wall panels, adding a Hans Wegner table/desk and chair along with other furnishings that echoed the original era of the house. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

The family room, by Jeff Akseizer and Jamie Brown of Akseizer Design Group, features a modern linear gas fireplace, which is flanked by niches framed in white, with room below for upholstered stools for extra seating when needed. Artwork around the room is framed in the same white framing as the niches. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

Nancy Colbert’s soothingly gray master bedroom features an impressive bed by Hickory Chair, traditional in shape but totally contemporary in its details. The softly curtained wall behind the bed adds lushness to the setting. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

At one end of the mudroom is a dressing room by Cahill Design Build. The fish “art” is actually a shower door rescued from an original upstairs bathroom set into a frame ringed on the inside with LED lights. / Photo by Nancy McKeon.

At the opposite end of the mudroom is Cahill Design Build’s bath, whose walk-in shower wall is alive with engraving-style fish from Italo Ceramica. / Photo by Angie Seckinger.

The Cahill shower features a tileable shower drain, allowing for a virtually uninterrupted design. / Photo by Nancy McKeon.

The 2014 DC Design House opens on Sunday, April 13, and is set in a 1929 Colonial-style stone house in the Forest Hills section of Northwest Washington belonging to the grand-daughter of Marshall B. Coyne, who founded the Madison Hotel, now the Loews Madison, on 15th Street NW. Six bedrooms, five full baths (and two half-baths) over three floors and almost 8,000 square feet meant there was a lot for 29 designers to work with.

The Design House began in 2008, when the National Symphony Women’s Committee ended its long run of designer showhouses. It has quickly become the pre-eminent decorator event in the region and has been a financial success, raising more than $1 million for Children’s National Health System since inception. It has been a critical success as well, because of the talent of the designers, of course, but also because since the beginning it has been conceived as a “flowing themed design house,” as two of the founders, Skip and Debbie Singleton of  DC Living Real Estate, describe it in the showhouse program booklet. That means that there is a coherent aesthetic in evidence throughout the many rooms. In other words, no “Rosemary’s Baby” room, the weird ugly duckling that so often lurks inside other, more eclectic, decorator showhouses.

The house, open to the public through Sunday, May 11, is at 4600 Linnean Avenue in Northwest Washington. Tickets are $25.

–Nancy McKeon