The home’s primary bathroom is located in the new structure, with daylight filtered through a brick screen. Photo © Dallas & Harris Photography, click to enlarge.

F&M designed the house partly on spec, and buyers David and Judy Steiner arrived in time for the studio to finesse the plan and finish the interiors exactly to their liking. “David pictured the main level of the Victorian as a speakeasy,” Stewart-Severy recalls, adding that that vision transformed the cottage from a “series of accessory rooms into a focal point of hospitality.” In response, F&M configured the front of the main level into a lounge whose secret-door bookcase leads to the kitchen pantry, and a bar where a backlit slab of onyx frames cocktail preparation. Formal dining occupies a discrete double-height room in the rear.

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A Victorian cottage (1) houses a bar (2), a powder room (3), and the guest suite’s bathroom (4). Photo © Dallas & Harris Photography

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“The main level really came to life with the Steiners,” Stewart-Severy says of the crowd-pleasing interiors. Yet that dazzle also meant defying a different piece of local real-estate wisdom, which is to make a house’s powder room as big as possible. To maximize room for guests instead, F&M reduced that bathroom to two fixtures and tucked it beneath the historic stairs. The design team retained the powder room’s showmanship, by specifying a large shimmering vanity that is scribed so precisely to fit the surrounding panel walls that it appears to almost push against them. These vertical surfaces feature the same grassy hue that coats the “speakeasy’s” millwork.

The kitchen is placed in a glass volume. Photo © Dallas & Harris Photography

Color continuity extends to the second-floor suite, where a wall of dimensional green tile backs a pair of oak-veneered cabinets in the expansive guest bath, and complementary green veins of cipollino marble top the basins and enclose the shower stall. The composition of greens contrasts with the Steiners’ own bathroom, where a space entirely white but for a calacatta viola marble vanity has daylighting filtered through the new structure’s brick screen and a skylight. All of the Victorian’s spaces are further unified by bowed forms, including a quarter-round commode upstairs. F&M carefully derived these curves from a baseboard detail as part of the architects’ overall goal to, as Stewart-Severy puts it, “design as if someone will one day want to preserve both structures.”