Scott Satin and Marilyn Kitzes were frustrated: While they dreamed of renovating a midcentury-modern house, their beloved neighborhood in Washington, DC—which they were loath to abandon—was dominated by colonial and Arts-and-Crafts-style homes.

Talking about the quandary with a friend one day, Marilyn learned about a potential hidden gem. “She asked me if I had seen the house across the alley,” Marilyn, a freelance copywriter, recalls. “I had no idea what she was talking about.”

So, they took a walk to view the property. “She showed me this incredibly overgrown house that was vacant,” she says. “And I just had this real feeling of ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this house is standing here.’”

Before: Facade

The house was “a little strange looking” and not on the market, so Marilyn knocked on a few neighbors’ doors to find out more about the property. It was part of an estate, and the owner had died four years prior.

“It was a simple structure,” says Scott, a trained but non-practicing architect (he now works as the president of a digital health research company). “It had a single gable roof and one load-bearing wall down the middle of the house. It was essentially a square box. It was obvious just by looking at it that we could blow it wide open and create the kinds of spaces we were hoping for.”

After: Facade

They bought the home from the estate’s executor in 2015, and their first call was to architect David Thompson of the Los Angeles–based studio Assembledge+. Scott had gone to architecture school with him, and the two had previously worked together when Scott was practicing.

Before: Staircase

Thompson came out to DC for a “coffee-fueled, 72-hour charrette” in which they plotted out the fundamental ideas and design tenets. They wanted to bring a California sensibility to the home with a fluid connection between indoors and the landscape, and open the interior with an airy, central stair that would allow light to flood the space and create sight lines from front to back.

After: Staircase

“That’s the most important piece of the project, from which everything else moves around,” says Scott of the staircase, adding that the challenge was to balance the desire for privacy with the openness of floor-to-ceiling windows.

Given the logistical difficulties of working with an architect on the other side of the country, the couple hired VW Fowlkes of local firm Fowlkes Studio to actually bring the project to life and handle things like generating construction documents and architectural detail development, as well as engineering coordination (plus, they loved his aesthetic and the fact that he was game for a collaborative project).

The multi-year rebuilding started with demolition of nearly everything except the roof, foundation, some floor joists, and the brick portions of the exterior walls.

Fowlkes looked at the structure as a sort of “brick parentheses” with the rooms “flowing openly inside it,” which helped solidify many of the design concepts and inform material choices. They painted the pink brick a sophisticated charcoal gray, and opened the facade with a two-story expanse of glass that showcases the central stair, opening the house horizontally and vertically.

After: Skylight

Adding a skylight above that central axis was one of the more challenging parts of the project because of the trusses that run from brick wall to brick wall.

“There was a lot of hand-wringing over whether or not to spend the money to modify the truss or make the skylight smaller,” says Fowlkes. But in the end, the homeowners decided to keep the truss exposed, allowing it to slice through the skylight, and it’s now a favorite feature.

“During the summer, a big blank wall [in the stair] gets super cool shadow patterns on it from the sun coming through the truss,” says Scott.

Before: Rear Facade

After: Rear Facade

If the front of the house is “fortress-like,” the back is the opposite, opening to multiple outdoor spaces that are a marriage of California modernism and the regional vernacular. For the wall of windows between the living room and terrace, they opted against sliders because they would be impractical in DC’s humid climate.

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

They also added a screened-in porch, a necessity to keep mosquitos out, and equipped it with heaters for use in colder months.

A decision by Fowlkes that proved to be rather ingenious was pushing the screened-in porch off of the house by 12 feet, so the structure doesn’t block the window over the kitchen sink, allowing for more light and air. “Had we not done that push, the kitchen would have felt a lot more enclosed,” says Scott.

It also created an opportunity for the main bedroom to have a private deck, connected to the house by a small bridge—a feature that was a pleasant surprise. “That deck is my favorite part of the house, and it was the literally only part of the house that we didn’t plan,” says Scott.