Finding the Right Angle

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A Design Dream Come True

Jeff and Alice Speck use a flatiron lot to create a geometric showcase.

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"I love all the light coming in both sides from the windows," Alice says. "We really feel like we're in the trees."

On the top floor, two bedrooms share a spacious bathroom. The master bedroom benefits from a balcony with a vista of the Washington Monument. A curtain can be pulled across the stair landing to define a dressing room.

A steel staircase, weighing nearly five tons, makes it all work. Jeff playfully drops a marble into the hollow stair rail. It pings its way to the basement, rolling to a stop at the guest room door. Steel reappears as the floor of triangular stair landings and as the structural support for a window seat.

Jeff credits Alice with making the critical suggestion to locate the staircase in the southeast corner of the triangle. That freed up precious square footage on each floor. "You can have an instinct, but on a tight lot, you don't know until you draw it," he says.

There are no pointed rooms. The angle that appears so prominent on the exterior is hidden in a closet on the first floor, occupied by a wood-burning fireplace on the second and houses the chimney on the top floor. "I knew I didn't want to occupy the point," Jeff says. "It's better to look at than to be in."

Jeff came more naturally to contemporary architecture than did Alice, who grew up with traditional houses and split-rail fences in the Midwest. His childhood was spent in a suburban Boston house designed by an apprentice of the modernist master Walter Gropius. After earning a master's in architecture at Harvard on his way to becoming a certified city planner, he worked for the new urbanist planning and architecture firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. He calls himself "lead designer" on the house, which was finalized with help from an architect friend, Brie Husted.

The house was not simple to build. The cantilevers required a steel frame for support, and oversize panels of glass, including interior window walls in the kitchen and Jeff's office, demanded special handling. A polished concrete slab intended for a console between dining and living areas was incorrectly measured but found a new purpose as a seating element outside the front door.

"Tolerances were very small," Jeff allows, and "some things had to be built twice. Flatiron lots are not the solution if you want to save money."

As a professional advocate of sustainable design, Speck insisted on going solar at home. The house has a 12-panel, 2-kilowatt system of photovoltaic cells on the roof. Other features include a solar water heater, dual-flush toilets, radiant heating under the sub-flooring and high-velocity air-conditioning, which avoided intrusive ductwork.

Today, neighbors include Howard University and the National Park Service, which owns a triangular patch of lawn just beyond the point of the house. One can imagine it as the site of some future national pocket park, but for now, the star on the block belongs to the Specks.

Jeff worked hard to make sure the new house would fit in. He maintained the 19th-century rhythm of punched windows of the adjacent rowhouses and nodded to the industrial loft aesthetic of a university building across 10th Street. But the distinctive angles and expanses of glass exude a bold 21st-century spirit.

For Alice, the biggest surprise has been the lack of noise around the urban site. "On weekends and nights, Florida Avenue is really quiet," she says. "When we eat out on the balcony, we feel like we're in this really dense area, but it's all ours."