The neighborhood is quintessential South Philadelphia. East of the city’s Italian Market along the Delaware River, Pennsport’s streets are lined with weathered brick row houses and anchored by 19th-century school buildings and grand churches. The clubs that participate in the Mummers Parade, the colorful folk festival held on New Year’s Day every year since 1901, have their workshops along 2nd Street.

The area provided the perfect canvas for artist Orna Willis and her husband, Reid, an attorney. They wanted to live in one of the city’s older neighborhoods, but they also needed an open, live/work space with a significant amount of natural light—which is not easy to find when many of the homes are more than a century old and no more than 12 to 16 feet wide. They hit upon a solution when they acquired three adjacent vacant lots and hired local architecture firm Qb3 to make the most of their combined footprint.

Qb3 created a near-perfect 38-foot cube, with living and work spaces divided across three floors. Partners Kevin Angstadt, Patrycja Doniewski, and Stephen Mileto looked to a concept with Renaissance roots for inspiration: the piano nobile, or “noble floor,” in which the main living and entertaining areas of a home are on the second story, up and away from the noise of the street.

Fortunately for Reid, Orna, and their teenage daughter, Nina, Pennsport is already pretty serene, so the noble floor isn’t so much protected from the noise as it is perfectly positioned for afternoon light. With northern and southern exposure and walls of floor-to-ceiling windows, the space affords leafy views rarely found in an urban setting. “I get the sense of being in a tree house the moment I go to the second floor,” Orna says.

A glass-enclosed winter garden full of thriving plants adds more greenery and acts as a room divider, as does a glass wall near the kitchen, but their transparency gives the entire floor a sense of flexibility and ease. “Doing partitioning work without solid walls leads to a feeling of openness, but the glass panels give it a geometry and logic,” says Mileto.

On the third floor, both bedrooms open onto a family room featuring an upright piano for Nina, who is already an accomplished composer. The first floor houses Orna’s studio, a spacious area full of colorful beads and strands of hand-dyed silk in every imaginable hue.

A few steps lead down to the covered courtyard, garden, and backyard sitting area. Reid has a film library and screening room in the basement where he can watch his favorite classic movies. The home’s exterior is wrapped in cypress treated in the Japanese shou sugi ban technique, in which deliberate charring preserves the wood and lends its surface a rich charcoal color.

As in many nearby Philadelphia neighborhoods, Pennsport has recently seen its vacant lots and older houses replaced by larger structures—some far out of scale with the neighborhood. With its unusual color and form, Reidand Orna’s house is an undeniably contemporary presence, but one that the two hope eases into the neighborhood. “It’s not an ostentatious house,” Orna says. “It doesn’t scream.”

Project Credits:

Architect: Qb3 LLC

Engineer: Fidelis Engineering, Inc.

Carpenter: Muetterties Carpentry

Metalwork: En Motion Design

Interior finishes: Orna Willis