When Murry Gerber looked around the affluent neighborhoods of his hometown of Pittsburgh, he saw numerous examples of the stately mansions that once were home to industrialists and entrepreneurs, the likes of which included Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and Charles Schwab. During the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, the north side of Pittsburgh was a separate township known as Allegheny City, and it was the most desirable location for Pittsburgh’s wealthiest families to call home. More than a century later, when Gerber set out to build his own home on a 33-acre hillside plot overlooking the city, he was determined to reflect the grandness of those historic estates. "He wanted to prove that spectacular, grand residential architecture was still possible today, and it is," says Joe St. Jean, the lead architect at Scholz Design (www.scholzdesign.com), the Ohio-based firm that Gerber commissioned with the project.
Gerber and his wife wanted a home that emulated the look and feel of a Tuscan-style villa, and the finished residence—a 12,000-square-foot, six-bedroom home built of rusticated stone, limestone, and specially commissioned red clay roof tiles—does just that. In fact, as Chris Gibson, the president and CEO of Scholz Design explains, the home and its acreage easily can convince guests that they are thousands of miles away from greater Pittsburgh. "When you’re on the property, it feels like you’re in a completely different country," he says. "It’s a whole other world; you feel like you’re a continent away."
Although Gerber envisioned the basic style and look of his dream home, he was not as sure of the specific details. That’s where Scholz came in. "I’m not an architect," he says, "so I didn’t expect to have a lot of input in terms of the detail. But I knew basically what I wanted to build, and I fell in love with their style, their attitude, their professionalism, and their desire to help build what I had in my head."
It’s that philosophy that separates Scholz from many other architectural firms out there. As Gerber explains, he had met with previous architects about this specific project but walked away unimpressed, convinced that those firms had a more vested interest in building a home that they envisioned, not the home that Gerber had in mind. But it’s no accident that Scholz approached Gerber’s project from a different perspective. As St. Jean acknowledges, he and his team constantly remind themselves that the house is for the owner, who must be happy at the end of the day. "Number one, it’s not my house or my dream; it’s someone else’s," he says. "If I’m going to satisfy anybody in the relationship, it has to be them. You have to find common ground for the owner to be able to communicate what their dreams and ideas are. That’s where the challenge comes in. You really have to listen."
In creating such a dramatic and successful home, Scholz left no stone unturned. A period designer traveled to Europe to buy antique tapestries, furniture, framed artwork, and rugs for the interiors, while the exterior was styled to resemble a family estate that gradually evolved over generations. As St. Jean explains, the home is meant to look as though it was built over a span of decades, not one that all came together at the same time. And, perhaps most important, special attention was paid to assure that this modern-day mansion felt warm and inviting. "I’ve been in some large houses and they feel huge, but this house doesn’t feel out of scale or ostentatious at all," Gibson says. "Every room in the house feels comfortable."
While Scholz is renowned in the Midwest, New Englanders often turn to TMS Architects (www.tmsarchitects.com) of Portsmouth, N.H. Like Pittsburgh’s Allegheny City neighborhoods, the north shore of Massachusetts is home to many expansive and historic family estates. However, unlike Scholz Design, which has established a reputation for building new estate residences tens of thousands of square feet in size, TMS has carved out a significant niche for the restoration and renovation of similar-sized but century-old homes. One such example, a 14,000-square-foot estate built upon a prominent point and surrounded on three sides by the Atlantic, recently required both a restoration and a partial renovation. The original home was built in the mid-1890s, but an addition of almost 7,000 square feet was added during the 1920s, which may have provided staff quarters but completely altered the look and feel of the home. "It was not taking advantage of the site or the views," Rob Carty, a partner and principal architect at TMS, says of the home prior to its restoration in 2010.
Fortunately, the homeowners understood what they had, what the home once was, and what it could be again. "It had such merit," Carty says, "and they wanted to bring back the grandeur to the estate, to the way it should’ve been." To accomplish that, TMS completely gutted the additional 1920s portion of the home, building a new entryway to those less formal rooms, which would serve as the everyday living areas for the family, and completely redesigned the space to maximize the views offered by the home’s locale. The footprint of the original home also was improved, with only slight interior design modifications.
The finished product is one that evokes the magnificence that the original home first possessed at the turn of the 20th century. Such restoration efforts help the company with its new construction projects as well. "In order to build new houses that replicate old Colonials and coastal homes, you have to understand the historical part of it before you get started," Carty says.
Once such new build, a 17,000-square-foot home outside Portsmouth, offered TMS a similar site on which to work—more than six acres on the outermost reaches of a peninsula jutting into the ocean. The firm integrated numerous outdoor terraces, which incorporated the homeowners’ active lifestyles and love of the outdoors, but TMS also had to tackle the obstacle of size. "Whenever you have a large home like that, the challenge to me is how to create a warm, inviting, comfortable, and cozy interior," says William Soupcoff, one of the firm’s founders. "It’s a challenge architecturally and spatially to create the interior design of a home that’s casually elegant and intimate."
To accomplish that, Soupcoff and his team made sure every room had a visual focal point—a fireplace or wall paneling, for example—that could serve as a central gathering place for furnishings. Bay windows, nooks, and other architectural touches also were added to create further intimacy, while crown moldings and other treatments offset rooms with high ceilings. "We’ve built our reputation around detailing the interior and exterior of the house very carefully," Soupcoff says. "We spend a lot of time on the moldings and hardware and light fixtures, making sure it all integrates seamlessly."
The biggest challenge when designing grand estate homes—at least when those homes aim to reflect European manors from centuries past—is to marry historic styling with modern-day lifestyles. Harvey Robertson, a principal at RMT Architects (www.rmtarchitects.com) in Colorado, is quite familiar with the task. "If you look at classic European architecture, those spaces or buildings used to have a lot of wall and not much window, and the reason was they had so much trouble heating [the home]," he says. "The window was all about letting light in, but not so much about bringing in the view."
Today’s homeowners, by contrast, are looking to bring the outside in, which requires architects like Robertson to establish careful compromises along the way. "They’re looking for a certain emotion in the architecture that was never present before," he says of today’s homeowners, explaining that when it comes to reflecting historical architecture and combining necessary elements of modern lifestyles, "the closer you get to one, the farther away you move from the other, so maintaining a balance is very delicate."
Perhaps the best example of such a compromise can be found in Stonebriar Park, Texas, where RMT built a 9,100-square-foot home incorporating elements of both French manors and English estates. Utilizing numerous towers, arcades, and other building forms, RMT was able to create an intimate residence, since the entire home was not housed under a single roof structure. The numerous facades allowed for a design that included enough windows to bring in the pastoral views without compromising the visceral reactions that the architecture conveyed. As Robertson explains, it’s all about what the client wants. "You go through a process of discovery," he says. "What differentiates architects is the ability to establish communication with a client. We establish a vocabulary and rewrite the story [of the architectural style] with the current needs that people have today."
