PROJECT: Dziedzina Residence, St. David’s, PA
ARCHITECT: Peter Zimmerman Architects, Berwyn, PA: Peter H. Zimmerman, AIA, principal;
William H. Johnson, III, AIA, project architect
CONTRACTOR: C. Raymond Davis & Sons, Inc.: Al Buly, project manager
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From Sore-Thumb to Sympathetic Addition
Pennsylvania-based Peter Zimmerman Architects was commissioned to renovate a garage for a residence in St. David’s, PA, but the garage stuck out against the 94-year-old building like a sore thumb. Instead, the firm ended up demolishing the garage and building a new, freestanding one, along with a breezeway, terrace and courtyard. The goal of the project was to seamlessly integrate the additions with the existing fieldstone house, and to renovate its porch in keeping with the 1907 style.
The original garage, built in the 1950s, was architecturally inappropriate, made of stucco on block with an asphalt shingle roof that didn’t match the house’s older style. The garage blocked two arched stone openings on the porch, therefore limiting the amount of sunlight hitting it and would have blocked a second-story window if the roof pitch had been raised to match that of the house. Peter Zimmerman Architects decided that the best thing to do was to demolish and rebuild the garage. The addition included the garage and a glass breezeway (1,260 sq.ft.), a 1,600-sq.ft. cobblestone courtyard and a 960-sq.ft. terrace. “Our goal was to create additions so that the difference between the original and the new was indeterminable,” explains Peter Zimmerman, Principal with the firm. “The materials, detailing and proportion were all designed as if they were originally placed on the site, to look as if a free-standing carriage house was built with the house and then, later, a covered walkway was added for convenience.”
The most complex challenge in dealing with the 94-year-old structure was matching the stone and other details. “We had a difficult time matching the hand-carved limestone detailing and the antique tile roof,” Zimmerman recounts. “We ended up finding antique tiles from a building that had come down in Chicago, identical to the original tiles.” The antique salvaged clay tiles were used to provide a sympathetic response to the unique existing clay-tile roof on the main house. Heavily sooted tiles were acid washed after being placed on the roof to accent the natural weathering process.
Custom cast-stone products were utilized in lieu of natural stone elements due to the unavailability of the original locally quarried stone lintels, coping and sills (the quarry closed almost 75 years ago). “When the house was built, there were 175 quarries open in area, with a different mineral deposit in every area,” Zimmerman explains. “Now there are maybe 10 or 15 quarries, so finding a stone that was very similar in color and geological makeup was hard, but we did end up finding limestone and sandstone with almost the same geological makeup. It was so similar you can’t tell the difference.”
Another challenge was dealing with the garage. “We wanted to have a freestanding garage with enough room for a car to turn around comfortably, but still have the garage close enough to the house,” Zimmerman states. By shifting the garage away from the house, the architects were able to keep all the existing gable windows and reopen the arched stone portals to light and views. In addition, this created room for the courtyard and breezeway. A cupola and a cast-stone parapet wall accent the new garage. Custom arched overhead garage-bay doors were detailed to look like carriage doors.
“We matched the details from the house all the way across, how the windows were set, the soffit spaces, dormers, the kind of detailing in relation to the roof tile and dormers. The idea was to design it in a way that would have been appropriate if a carriage house had been built there when the house was built. We did use the original carriage house, which was subdivided off and is now on neighboring property, as a guide, but what we built is not nearly as grand. We took hints from how they used materials, along with proportion and scale,” Zimmerman says. The result, like the main house, is in an English country-house style. “While it’s eclectic in its use of details, the origins are clearly European,” he notes.
To link the house to the garage, the architects added a breezeway. An aged copper roof was detailed to match the existing copper roof on the front entry porch. Custom-milled wood elements such as rafters’ ends, trusses, casing, brackets, trim and soffits were created and installed by local craftsmen to match the one-story wooden porch. “Our drawings provided the blueprint for the craftsmen to follow; however, it was their own personal attention to detail and passion about the work that made each piece unique and special,” claims the firm. The architects renovated the porch, in addition to their work on the garage and breezeway. “Through an archaeological process we were able to find original details that we recreated in the breezeway,” Zimmerman says. – Marieke Cassia Gartner
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