Location: Adrian, Michigan
Featured on the cover of Beautiful Homes, Winter 2008
Interior design by Tracy Hickman, a Chicago Interior Design Hall of Fame designer
The owners of this 1850s Greek Revival brick home needed more living space now, and a ground-floor master suite for later on. Our one-story addition does both. A large living and dining room, reading alcoves and a sunroom share a central fireplace. Later, pocket doors will turn the sunroom into a bedroom and the living room into a sitting room, with a full bath and closet already in place.
“The original Greek Revival building was the starting point, but I knew we shouldn’t try to pretend that this addition was original,” I told the magazine. We used similar materials for a sympathetic addition, “classically inspired, but not strictly classical.”
- A fireplace designed around art. The shared hearth was built to show off the owners’ Joan Miró, L’Ogre Enjoué, as a colorful focal point.
- Grand but human-scaled. A high ceiling floods the room with light, and a dropped cornice brings it back to human scale.
- Classical rules, reinvented. A cove-and-bead cornice with inverted and repeating corners, and small pilasters supporting the mantel.
- Inside meets outside. Fluted pilasters in the sunroom echo the exterior, and art-glass transoms sit over a paneled wall that hides the TV.
- A place to linger. Bench seating eases the transition to the dining area. As Tracy Hickman put it, “I love the idea of a banquette here.”
“Everything is integrated and lines up with something else. There is a reason for the location of each and every element.”
