Innovative Design Quarterly June 2016

UNIQUE APPLICATIONS IN ARCHITECTURE & LIGHT

ISSUE 616 • 2016

6 South Congress Hotel 18 26 Decatur House

Boulder Public Library Creekside Revival

SoCo Cool

Historical Inclusion

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A new hotel in Austin’s South Congress district encourages guests, as the city itself does, to arrive as you are.

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6 Boulder Public Library Photos by David Lauer

16 Design Workshop 18 South Congress Hotel Photos by Nick Simonite

26 Product Showcase 28 Decatur House Photos by Michael Brown

38 Global Lighting News Making the switch

Innovative Design Quarterly Magazine, Issue Volume 616, is published quarterly by Gow Industries, Inc., PO Box 160, Elkton, SD 57026.

Editor: Camille LeFevre Postmaster: Send address changes to Innovative Design Quarterly Magazine, PO Box 160, Elkton, SD 57026 Subscription Inquiries: There is no charge for subscriptions to qualified requesters in the United States. All other annual domestic subscriptions will be charged $29 for standard delivery or $65 for air delivery. All subscriptions outside the U.S. are $65. For subscriptions, inquiries or address changes contact info@innovativedesignquarterly.com.

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Copyright Š 2016 Innovative Design Quarterly Magazine. All rights reserved. Nothing in publication may be copied or reproduced without prior written permission of the publisher. All material is compiled from sources believed to be reliable, but published without responsibility for errors or omissions. Innovative Design Quarterly and Gow Industries Inc, assume no responsibilities for unsolicited manuscripts or photos. Printed in the USA.

TA B L E O F

CONTENTS Boulder Public Library

South Congress Hotel

Decatur House 5

Creekside Revival

Boulder Public Library studiotrope Design Collective Joseph Montalbano, Architect & Principal Photos by David Lauer

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studiotrope Design Collective takes the main Boulder Public Library from drab to dramatic with a future-proof reinvention.

Since the original Boulder Public Library was built in 1961, adjacent to and north of Boulder Creek in Colorado, the beloved community resource has been enlarged with two additions. In 1974, a second building connected the library’s original structure with an existing building on the south side of the creek via a window-clad bridge, which included a cafÊ for library patrons and visitors alike. In 1992, the second building was updated with daylighting techniques and

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energy conservation measures; an entrance pavilion with a sandstone base and glass upper story; and additional square footage for an auditorium, a children’s reading room and an area for non-print media.

While Boulder’s main public library had many iconic features and attractive attributes, the sprawling structure proved uninviting over the ensuing decades. The original library was far away from the 1992 addition’s entrance, making wayfinding difficult. On arrival, patrons were greeted with a wall of backs—people seated at computer terminals—and heavy, foreboding service desks. Tall stacks filled with books, from the lowest most-inaccessible shelves to the hard-to-reach top levels, were placed against windows in order to have more volumes seemingly available for browsers.

Hidden pockets resulted: dark, undesirable and often unsafe spaces in an urban library.

The café on the bridge closed and became a haven for the homeless population; while the library was happy to provide the indigent with a warm place to rest, staff also knew that wasn’t the library’s best use and patrons were becoming uncomfortable walking across the bridge.

Moreover, the library had become dark, drab and uninviting.

Last year, studiotrope Design Collective in Denver transformed the library from drab to dynamic. The passage of a municipal bond in 2011 provided funds for updating electrical and

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The library’s new cafÊ, on the bridge overlooking Boulder Creek, includes new sustainable flooring, and a stone and wood counter.

power systems, replacing carpet, and accessibility improvements that would bring the library into alignment with ADA compliance. So the design team started with these essentials. But the bond also provided for relocating the children’s area, upgrading the teen area and improving browsing in the collections.

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studiotrope removed book shelves against the floor-to-ceiling windows to reveal light and views, while the new children’s area includes a multi-level space or “rapids” accessible via a large garage door that swings up and open.

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“We started with the community,” says Joseph Montalbano, architect and principal with studiotrope Design Collective. “The scope of work actually morphed as we met with community members and learned about things the City of Boulder hadn’t considered or didn’t think the project could afford. Ultimately, the City allocated additional funding to address all the community’s aspirations for the library. We didn’t change any part of the building exterior; we focused on the interior architecture and reinvented the look and feel.”

Montalbano’s approach during the community meetings, he says, was to demonstrate how his team could “future-proof the library, which means spending money on attributes that will stand the test of time. We didn’t bring an agenda to the workshops, other than to present the future possibilities of libraries. We then had the participants discuss their aspirations and ask questions. From that input we generated an experience map. We layered the community’s new aspirations over the existing library floor plans to uncover the latent beauty hidden by the existing conditions. This became our road map for the library’s reinvention.”

The design team also conducted its own due diligence, studying how patrons used the library, where they walked freely or got stuck, the dark spots that inhibited use and the opportunities that were unrealized. From all of this data, studiotrope created a guiding architectural concept called the “Stream of Serendipity.” Says Montalbano, laughing, “Only in Boulder could you get away with that kind of concept. But it was useful and it worked!”

The “Stream,” which documented how people flow through the library, indicated where visitors “got caught up in eddies, where they moved more rapidly through rapids, ponds where they gathered and slowed down, sandbars where they docked for a while,” Montalbano explains. “All of these became useful metaphors for how to reinvent the space.”

The design team added accessibility ramps between the library’s two levels and widened the aisles. They rearranged the book stacks away from the windows in the first-floor fiction section, the second-floor reference and computer section, and in the “treehouse” seating and work areas in the northwest corner. “People said ‘Wow! You added windows.’ But no, the windows were already there,” Montalbano says. Computers were moved from the main entry to the second level, and the main entry sequence is now a “sandbar” or gathering space with digital signage.

The children’s area was originally a big noisy unsecure room with tall shelves and even taller ceilings next to the main entrance. The design team moved the children’s area up half a level, between the 1974 and 1991 additions, and inserted a “rapids” or tiered seating area in a glassenclosed, mini-auditorium. Kids can run up and down the giant steps or sit on them on during story hour.

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The café has become a terrific amenity for the library, helping it to become the “Place to Be in Boulder.”

An operable garage-door-like wall pivots up to open the space, or can be closed to divide the children’s room from the rest of the library. The glass of the dividing wall, as well as other glass enclosing the children’s area, is decorated with a custom-designed, undulating, white and yellow grass-like pattern that signifies the ephemeral nature of childhood. A bright-orange, well-lit tunnel connects the children’s area with the main library; the tunnel’s undulating, soundabsorbing ceiling and walls absorb the kids’ playful screams.

The design team worked with Boulder teens on their space. “We showed lots of slides— fast—and the kids had to cheer or boo for each one,” Montalbano says. “It was pretty electric.

And by the end, we knew what they wanted.” Book stacks were moved out. Lounge chairs, computer stations and worktables were put in. Hexagonal “ripples” in a honeycomb pattern on the ceiling—the ripples are meant to evoke the transitional state between childhood and adulthood; the honeycomb a sense of community; the occasional yellow ripple, the individual— also function as an acoustical treatment.

Adjacent to the teen area is a maker studio with high-powered graphics computing, green screens for making movies and equipment for recording music. The design team created new environmental graphics for an existing stairwell and a waterfall ripple pattern for the glass walls that causes the light patterns to change throughout the day. The community rooms or “eddies” are marked with clusters of blue and green “river rocks” with various degrees of transparency.

Renovating the bridge café overlooking the creek was also a priority. The design team installed new sustainable flooring, an acoustical ceiling, recessed lighting where the line forms at the stone and wood counter, and pendant lights over seating areas. A new local vendor,

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“

Our job is to take communities on an aspirational journey, to help them look beyond their immediate needs and think about what they want to achieve in the future. Then we enjoy the tremendous satisfaction of transformation, of reinventing that library for that community.�

-Joseph Montalbano

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“

“The concept driver, the Stream of Serendipity, imbued a thread of continuity across the widespread renovation, as we touched just about every part of the library’s interior.”

-Joseph Montalbano

The waterfall ripple pattern on the windows causes light patterns to change throughout the day.

which serves locally sourced food, has experienced success in the new café. In fact, the café has become a place for people to gather and eat, whether or not they use the library.

“If more libraries would invest in amenities like a café, they’d attract more people who might not otherwise use the library,” Montalbano says. The café, he adds, has helped the library become the “Place to Be in Boulder,” because “it’s a spot—floating over the Boulder Creek—where you can enjoy good food, hang out and get away from the daily grind.”

“As with most of our design concepts, no one thinks about or recalls the concept driver, in this case the Stream of Serendipity, once the renovation is completed,” Montalbano says.

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“But it served its purpose, which was to imbue a thread of continuity across the widespread renovation, as we touched just about every part of the library’s interior.”

Libraries share the same core mission, yet each library project studiotrope takes on is unique, in large part because of the different communities those libraries serve. “These library projects inspire us to constantly be reinventing what it is that a library wants to be, how it would best serve its community,” Montalbano says. “Our job is to take communities on an aspirational journey, to help them look beyond their immediate needs and think about what they want to achieve in the future. Then we enjoy the tremendous satisfaction of transformation, of reinventing that library for that community.” n – CLF

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SoCo Cool A new hotel in Austin’s South Congress district encourages guests, as the city itself does, to arrive as you are.

South Congress Hotel 18

Michael Hsu Office of Architecture Maija Kreishman, Architect & Partner Dick Clark & Associates and Studio MAI Photos by Nick Simonite

“Austin has cool kids in spades—but it’s in strangely short supply of cool hotels,” declared Travel and Leisure recently about Texas’ state capital. Known as the “Live Music Capital of the World” for its South by Southwest (SXSW) festival for music, film and interactive events, and the annual Austin City Limits Music Festival, the city has nonetheless been experiencing something of a boutique hotel boom.

The latest to open—designed by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture in collaboration with Dick Clark and Associates, both based in Austin, and Studio MAI in Los Angeles—is the comfortable, modern South Congress Hotel. Located on a former .95-acre vacant lot that was a hub for food trucks in the South Congress or SoCo district of Austin, South Congress Hotel also assuaged Travel and Leisure’s complaint by being named one of the magazine’s “Best New Hotels on the Planet” in 2016.

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SoCo boasts a singularly eclectic mix of shops, restaurants, entertainment venues and street merchants. “Hipster” is an adjective frequently used to describe the area. After New Waterloo, an Austin development and hospitality management group, completed the elegant restoration of Hotel Ella near the University of Texas, with help from Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, the company tapped the same firm to collaborate on South Congress Hotel from the ground up.

The goal for New Waterloo was “a hotel that would fit into SoCo and interact with the street via the lobby and the food, beverage and retail

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components, to capture the locals and the visitors, but without being a cliché,” says Maija Kreishman, architect and partner at Michael Hsu Office of Architecture. “We wanted to make sure the design was comfortable, welcoming and approachable—like Austin, but also convey sophistication through finishes and furnishings.”

The 164,506-square-foot, three-story building includes 83 guest rooms.

An outdoor pool and bar on the second level anchor the adjoining suites. On the ground level are three restaurants, a coffee shop and several independent retailers. The design “is quite simple yet modern, with character and intentional

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We wanted to make sure the design was comfortable, welcoming and approachable—like Austin, but also convey sophistication through finishes and furnishings.”

– Maija Kreishman

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Green screen walls create a subtle transition between the district’s busy street life and the calm quiet interior of the hotel.

grittiness that allow the carefully chosen materials to shine and be seen,” Kreishman says.

“We weren’t inspired by an architectural period, but instead decided to convey a sense of the handmade.”

The building’s exterior palette of ivory-colored brick, terracotta, concrete and steel lend the appearance of “carefully crafted materials that will weather and patina over time,” Kreishman explains. Along the street, custom-designed terracotta screen walls allow passersby to peek into the hotel lobby during the day and experience a welcoming glow from the light that filters out at night.

The lobby is accessed via a courtyard off busy South Congress Avenue, with a landscape design featuring natural rock outcroppings and lush greenery that was inspired by local swimming holes. Inside, the lobby is a light-filled tranquil spot lush with greenery, and with a stairway to the second-floor pool. All of the spaces, inside and outdoors, needed to be enticing day and night.

“The design was tailored to allow people to spend time having meetings or working while enjoying coffee or lunch, and feel equally as comfortable dining here and then enjoying the lively nighttime atmosphere,” says Kreishman. Her team placed the two main restaurants on either street corner, with outdoor seating and landscaping (which will mature over time) that spill over onto the vibrant street to activate the pedestrian experience and engage the SoCo neighborhood.

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Throughout the hotel, the design emphasizes transitions between indoor and outdoor spaces, using landscaping, glass, wood, concrete and other natural materials.

The emphasis on indoor/outdoor spaces, landscaped and positioned so they can be viewed from locations throughout the hotel, allows “visitors to feel as though they’ve arrived at a place different from the day-to-day,” Kreishman says. In addition, the hotel’s ballroom has large sliding glass doors that open to an outdoor space accented with greenery.

Inside, the hotel has “simple architectural finishes,” Kreishman says, including raw steel, hand-troweled plaster and brass. The lobby has custom furnishings of wood and hand-stitched leather, “so the Concealed & Vandal-Proof guest touches a real experience that’s comfortable Fire Alarms and Emergency Lighting Systems and welcoming,” she adds. The guestrooms and suites

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Furnishings are a combination of new, vintage-inspired and customdesigned pieces sourced from across the globe, with artwork by local artisans.

include furniture and textiles

by Studio MAI—a combination of new, vintage-inspired and found pieces, many of them custom-designed, fabricated or sourced from around the world. Work by local artists is hung through the hotel.

The design team also worked on the restaurants and retail spaces. Café No Se is the hotel’s “all day café,” Kreishman says, “so we had to make sure it could easily transition from breakfast through lunch to dinner and into the late night.” The café’s décor includes large expanses of glass that let in abundant daylight, and whitewashed wood and blue tiles to reflect the light and give the café a fresh appeal. Recessed can lighting and other fixtures wash the walls and highlight the art, while decorative sconces lend the space a rich warm glow.

Central Standard is an American-style grill, with a large U-shaped bar and open kitchen that overlooks the dining room. “Its materials are a bit richer,” Kreishman explains. Walls of white hand-troweled plaster contrast with artisan greenblue tiles at the back of the bar and on the kitchen walls. The restaurant’s décor also includes brass accents and wood floors. A custom-made pendant fixture provides ambient light that can be dimmed at night. Recessed cans light the walls, artwork and other features.

The intimate Otoko is a single sushi bar. Here 12 diners enjoy a companionable experience with the sushi chefs. “We went more dramatic in this space,” Kreishman says. The team used

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“

The design is quite simple yet modern, with character and intentional grittiness that allow the carefully chosen materials to shine and be seen.” – Maija Kreishman

charred wood, rich rosewood and redwood for the décor, and placed in the center of the space a custom-designed fixture with strips of light diffused by glass, “to provide a dramatic lighting experience for this small space and concept,” she adds.

The team helped with Sunroom, a local women’s clothing and accessory boutique, and designed the nail salon run by New York City favorite Tenoverten. The salon, which faces a courtyard with plenty of daylight, is clad in warm rich hemlock wood, and features a custom light fixture that anchors the 10 stations. “The built-in pedicure chairs are upholstered as a soft counterpoint to the room’s other harder finishes,” Kreishman says. The hotel’s retail offerings also include the motorcycle shop Revival Cycles.

Another important feature of South Congress Hotel is its 250-car parking garage, because the hotel, its bars and restaurants, and its retail components are “not meant to appeal just to tourists,” Jesse Herman, operating partner of New Waterloo, told AustinWay. com. The complex was designed and built as an “amenity for the neighborhood. People maybe haven’t come to SoCo in a while because they think the traffic and parking are a pain—they can just come and valet their cars and enjoy it.”

Adds Kreishman, “Our overall desire, and biggest challenge, was to design South Congress Hotel so it felt like a part of the neighborhood. Because it’s a new building, and the district has a lot of history, people take tremendous pride in the area. We wanted to make sure the design of South Congress was appropriate given the existing urban fabric; that it would fit in and feel like it’s been here for a while. Moreover, the hotel needed to be a place where, like in Austin, you can arrive as you are.” n – CLF

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History isn’t just about Stephen Decatur, but also about Marie Beale who donated the house, and the servants and the slaves that supported the various owners.”

– Ward Bucher

Historical Inclusion The restoration of Decatur House in Washington D.C. represents an evolution in historic preservation toward celebrating the full history of a site.

Decatur House

Encore Sustainable Design LLC Ward Bucher, Co-founder & Principal Oak Grove Restoration Company Hank Handler, Vice President Photos by Michael Brown

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In 1819, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, known as the “Father of American Architecture,” completed a residence for naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur and his wife, Susan. The first private residence on Lafayette Square across from the White House, Decatur positioned his home—which, he told Latrobe, should be “fit for entertaining”— quite literally at the center of Washington D.C.’s social and political life.

Latrobe had designed portions of the White House, as well as St. John’s Episcopal Church, also known as the Presidents’ Parish. The architect’s nearly square, three-story, red brick home for Decatur, designed in the austere Federal style, centered on the exquisitely proportioned entrance or vestibule. The space, write Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee in Buildings of the District of Columbia, was “divided into three sections—a rectangle, a square, and a semicircle— by a barrel vault, a shallow dome, and a half dome in its vaulted ceiling.” These forms had been first seen in Latrobe’s designs for the United States Capitol. The spatial sequence also separated the public and private areas of the house.

“The main staircase,” Scott and Lee add, “which rises directly to the primary living quarters on the second story, is on the main axis and contained in a separate hall behind the curved doors that terminate the vestibule. A south door in the vestibule, to which one is subtly

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Decatur House is actually a complex of buildings that includes the original historic home, the servants’ quarters/gift shop and a carriage house/event center.

directed by the dome, opens to a suite of rooms from which Decatur conducted business…. To divide private spaces for family life from rooms where the public was invited, [Latrobe] created suites of rooms on the model of eighteenth-century French city mansions, a principle Thomas Jefferson had implemented at Monticello.”

A celebrity due to his conquests in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, Decatur only enjoyed his lavish new home for 14 months. In 1820, he was killed in a duel. Susan Decatur rented out the house for years, including to Henry Clay, a Secretary of State. In 1829 Charlotte Dupuy, a women enslaved by Clay, sued him for her right to freedom while living in the house. Over the years, various tenants housed their slaves in a two-story structure added in 1821, originally as servants’ quarters.

In 1871, General and Mrs. Edward Fitzgerald Beale purchased and modified the home.

After Mrs. Beale’s death in 1902, Decatur House became the property of the Beales’ son Truxton and his wife, Marie. Threatened several times with destruction, the house was bequeathed in 1956 by Marie Beale to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which now operates the property as a museum. In 2010, the White House Historical Association established the David M. Rubenstein National Center for White House History at Decatur House. Today, the slave quarters are used, in part, as an education center in the study of urban slavery and housing.

Before all of that could happen, however, Decatur House was in dire need of restoration.

Several renewal attempts had layered the home with finishes from multiple eras. Storms had blown shingles off the roof causing it to leak. The slave and servants’ quarters deserved

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historical study and documentation. The carriage house—added in the late-20th century— required a new purpose and a historical resonance that would bring it into alignment with Decatur House and the slave quarters.

In 2006, Hank Handler, vice president of Oak Grove Restoration Company, in Laytonsville, Maryland, was hired to rework the home’s mechanical system. That job turned into a commission to act as general contractor for the restoration of Decatur House. In collaboration with architect Ward Bucher, co-founder and principal of Encore Sustainable Design LLC, in Edgewater, Maryland, and other specialists, the team began the restoration with exterior repairs that

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In the home’s famous vestibule and stairway, nearly 30 coats of paint were carefully removed to reveal the original blue and yellow wall and trim colors, while the millwork and plaster dome were restored.

included masonry and window work. The team replaced most of the slate roof and all of the gutters and downspouts. They also repaired the stucco exterior of the slave quarters.

Another aspect of Decatur House’s restoration was the famed vestibule and stairway with hall. The team, with assistance from Davis Buckley Architects and Planners in Washington, D.C., meticulously researched and documented the home’s historic construction methods, masonry, plaster and floor finishes, and the subsequent alterations made to the house. In the vestibule and stairway hall, nearly 30 coats of paint were carefully removed.

“By examining the paint scrapes through a microscope, and in different kinds of light, we could determine the original colors,” says Bucher. Paint analysis revealed an original bright blue wall color with bright yellow trim, and the spaces were returned to that color scheme. Oak Grove craftsmen also repaired the vestibule’s plaster dome, cove ceiling and original millwork once these areas’ original surfaces were exposed.

Wide, wood plank floorboards in the front hall were removed, numbered, cleaned and reinstalled to correct settlements of up to two-and-a-half inches. Then the floors were covered with historically accurate carpets to protect them. A door added on the right side of the hall was removed and the wall restored. The stair treads were stripped and painted. Door and window hardware was restored to operating condition; lost hardware pieces were custom cast to match the missing originals.

The restoration of the vestibule and hall earned the team the AIA/DC Design Excellence Award for Historic Resources. The judges specifically praised the project’s “reflection of the rigors of pure historic preservation.” Bucher adds that the team’s restoration work “represents

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On the house’s second level, layers of finish on window shutters, paneling and doors were shaved off with razor blades. Chandeliers were rebuilt, a marble fireplace reinstalled, parquet floors restored, and tiger-oak doors and millwork revealed.

an evolution in preservation thinking; a move away from peeling away layers to expose a fixed moment in time toward celebrating the full history of a site. This is especially evident in the second-floor spaces, where finishes from multiple eras were conserved and restored using the latest technology.”

The second level of the house includes a dining room, ballroom and small sitting rooms.

One of the original finishes was discovered behind a radiator. Layers of finishes on window shutters, paneling and doors were shaved off with razor blades and scalpels, and analyzed using cross-sectional fluorescent microscopy and Fourier Transform Infrad Spectroscopy analysis to determine original finishes to be restored.

In the ballroom, paint was carefully removed to reveal tiger-oak doors and millwork, which Decatur’s records indicate are original to the house. Chandeliers were rebuilt; the parquet floor restored. Missing marble fireplace surrounds were found in the attic and reinstalled with damaged pieces replaced with new matching stone. A ceiling mural not original to the house was nonetheless repaired and repainted. A servants’ stair at the rear of the house, which rises three floors to offices, was left bare of paint or carpet, and new lighting was installed.

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At the same time, Bucher’s firm was preparing a Historic Structure Report documenting the slave quarters, in order to “recognize and honor the important role slaves and servants played in American history,” he says. Originally a separate building, the two-story wing was later connected to the back of Decatur House. The National Trust had been using the first floor of the structure as a gift shop. “We went in with a big eraser,” Bucher says, “to uncover original elements of the building and what the people who lived here had, which wasn’t much.”

Throughout the building, the team repaired the mechanical, electrical, lighting and fire-suppression/sprinkler systems, “shoehorning them in to make them invisible,” Handler

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The former servants’/slaves’ quarters was transformed into a gift shop on the first level and educational center upstairs, where aspects of the original structure were kept intact.

explains. The gift shop on the first floor was completely renovated, and new cabinets, lighting and flooring installed. Where the chimney was collapsing, “we reinforced it in that position,” Bucher says, “and built around it.” On the second floor, which is a digital education facility and used for teaching school students about American history, the team uncovered the chimney and floors, and retained the original structure’s rough simplicity.

Reinvigorating the carriage house “as a 21st-century dream of traditional imagery,” Bucher says, was another part of the project. A remnant of a historic carriage house rebuilt in 1986, the building was completely renovated into an event center. The new interior includes firesuppression and mechanical systems hidden along the tops of the walls and beneath the ceiling fixtures; upper walls embedded with coated acoustical material for sound absorption; variable control lighting and digital audio/visual systems; and a custom-designed carpet. King post trusses, elaborate cornices and high-end finishes “recall the aspirations of a new country,” Handler says.

The team added a colonnade or porch along the front of the carriage house to provide a transitional space between the outdoors and inside. Held up by limestone columns shaped for historical veracity, the porch has double doors that open up during events so visitors can spill out into the courtyard, which the team leveled, enlarged and repaved. Today, Decatur House is a multifaceted, multi-purpose complex of historic buildings, restored or renovated for public enlightenment and use.

Decatur House is also “the only intact residence on Lafayette Square,” Handler says. Its restoration, completed in 2011, adds Bucher, reflects “a new approach to history, which is now

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The carriage house was transformed into an event facility and designed to “recall the aspirations of a new country.”

much more inclusive. History isn’t just about Stephen Decatur, but also about Marie Beale who donated the house, and the servants and the slaves that supported the various owners.” The process not only added to the body of knowledge about the buildings’ past, but conserved significant architecture that’s integral to the historic urban fabric of Washington D.C.

At the same time, the work reflecting this new approach to historic preservation “used all of our talents at the highest level,” Handler says. “It wasn’t the first national historical landmark we worked on, but one where the client needed and required the best and most thorough and painstaking work. In terms of result, Decatur House is a masterpiece of restoration.”n – CLF

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