PRIMARY BATH

His and hers sinks, separated by a dressing table, epitomize the simple, clean, fresh design of the bathroom. The owner’s signature gold appears as cabinet hardware and frames the mirrors. The left mirror allows a glimpse of the soaking tub that sits under the double window.

The privacy-glass door of the toilet closet opens to expose the room’s flushreveal baseboard. This streamlined replacement for traditional baseboard is especially popular in bathrooms because it takes up no floor space and is easy to keep clean. Oh, and it really looks great, doesn’t it?

The owners’ vision for their forever home accommodates the young people of the family with an extraordinary wing. The bedrooms’ delightfully un-kid-like styling sets no age limitations. Each room will be as pleasing to a grown child returning for a visit as it is right now to the pre-teen youngster who inhabits it today.

Spacious, abundant with natural light, versatile in dimensions and layout, the four bedrooms and four baths on the upper level provide plenty of options for sleepovers, dedicated guest rooms, project rooms as the kids and their interests grow and change, and potential for morphing into a yoga escape or hobby central in the future.

The contemporary farmhouse that sits gracefully on its parcel of land and fills these pages with appealing images is one in a long line of interpretations of the 18th century stone farmhouse that southeastern Pennsylvanians know so well.

Richard Buchanan, AIA, a partner with Archer & Buchanan Architecture (A&B) and our featured home’s designer, could be said to have the Pennsylvania farmhouse tradition in his bones. More specifically, the farmhouse as it was influenced by American architect R. Brognard Okie—since he grew up in an Okie home in Chester County where he was taught that “a house designed by Brognard Okie was good and anything else was not.”

Okie’s work in the first half of the 20th century drew from the farmhouse aesthetic but was then influenced by Arts & Crafts materials and details. He is remembered for his Colonial-Revival houses and sensitive restorations of historic buildings.

It would be difficult to shake that early influence, especially if you were inclined to embrace it. As it was, after grad school in British Columbia, Richard returned to this area “because it’s about old buildings. And creating new buildings that draw on old buildings.”

The current enthusiasm for contemporary farmhouse design, he says, also owes to the influence of an Okie contemporary across the pond, Sir Edward L. Lutyens—Brits pronounce it LUTCHens—who imaginatively adapted a variety of traditional styles for his prolific catalogue of English country houses, war memorials and public buildings. Lutyens and Okie, Richard tells us, were serving similar clientele around the same time. “Their work had a creativity and modernity about it that was detailed in ways that drew on history.”

Themes from Lutyens’s work, such as his emphasis on creating drama between the front and rear of a home and capitalizing on elements of symmetry and asymmetry, are evident in this home. Richard points to the “rhythm and pattern of the multiple gables” that show so attractively in our spread on pages 4-5.