Fitty Wun
The design for Fitty Wun reflects the playful, sometimes irreverent, personalities of the clients, a couple with three active young boys and a “work hard, play hard” approach to life. The clients desired a house centered on large, light-filled central spaces where the kids and friends of the family would love to hang out today and also ten years from now. This space also acts as a welcoming, warm kind of “Panopticon that allows the boys the freedom to be boys while the parents are strategically within ear, if not always eyeshot, to arbitrate, adjudicate and apply basic medical direction” (the client’s words!).
The front façade is an interpretation of a traditional townhouse—a simple composition that blends in with the neighborhood but hints at the modern interior through scale and material choice. The main floor consists of a great room merging the kitchen, dining, and living rooms. The kitchen opens upward to the ceiling, bringing light down from two stories above. Nooks and innovative storage solutions allow the great room—a place for cooking, eating, working, and playing—to be the hub of the household without clutter. The living room flows out onto a deck and into the backyard, where there is plenty of space for the family’s varied, energetic activities.
The metal-screened stair, backed by a tiled feature wall, leads from the street-level entry to the upper floors, where a catwalk connects the bedrooms and rings the atrium. A diagonal stair over the atrium leads up farther to a floating office “pod” and the roof deck. The pod provides an acoustically separated space for the client to escape occasionally from all the excitement below. The roof deck, surrounded by a green roof, looks out to broad views.
