A Fresh Start
In a loftlike apartment in Washington, D.C., designer Darryl Carter juxtaposed the old and the new, the rough-hewn with the refined
Designed by Darryl Carter
Written by Mario López-Cordero
Photographed by Gordon Beall
Produced by Susan Tyree Victoria and Barbara Bohl
Published by Metropolitan Home
A Fresh Start
In a loftlike apartment in Washington, D.C., designer Darryl Carter juxtaposed the old and the new, the rough-hewn with the refined
Designed by Darryl Carter
Written by Mario López-Cordero
Photographed by Gordon Beall
Produced by Susan Tyree Victoria and Barbara Bohl
Published by Metropolitan Home
If you could manifest the proverbial clean slate (the tabula rasa) or could exemplify new beginnings, you might well conjure David Goodhand's light-drenched, 3,000-square-foot Washington, D.C., condo, which borrows so heavily from the industrial-loft vernacular, it doesn't look much like a condo at all. But this is no renovated warehouse in a gentrifying neighborhood. The three-bedroom family home is located in the Residences at the Ritz-Carlton, in the district's upscale Northwest sector.
Goodhand leaves behind in another life a six-bedroom Victorian townhouse that he once shared with his former partner and their ten-year-old son, Christopher. It had elaborate moldings and antique furnishings, and after the couple split, it became too much for Goodhand, a software strategist, to handle on his own. He nicknamed it "the jealous mistress" for the demands it made on his time and money. "I used to joke that I left $1,000 on the counter for her every month -- something always needed attention," he says.
In his new life with his son, he was seeking comfort and versatility, and to make the leap, Goodhand engaged one of Washington's premier designers, Darryl Carter, who is known for building bridges between the past and present with gorgeous yet livable results (his recent book, from Clarkson Potter, is titled The New Traditional). The self-taught Carter, who designs much of his own furniture, relishes the marriage of the rough-hewn and the refined, the sleek modern with the aged and sometimes distressed.
To kick-start his new life, Goodhand had to wipe the floor plan clean. The other apartments in the building are divided into smaller rooms and sport the kind of details that might seem fusty to a man fleeing a turn-of-the-century manse -- like chair rails and mahogany parquet floors set in a herringbone pattern. "The exterior architecture is very sleek," says Goodhand, "but you walk in, and all of sudden everything's Colonial Williamsburg." The basic footprint was an issue, too. "My favorite kinds of spaces are New York lofts, but how do you get that effect in a brand-new condo with nine-foot ceilings? You tear down walls."
To consolidate space, Goodhand worked with two architects. The first, Donald Lococo, established the new floor plan. The second, Wayne Good, who had worked with Goodhand before, was responsible for the finished structure. "The master bedroom had his-and-hers bathrooms and five separate closets," Goodhand remembers. "We combined them all into one bathroom and one closet." The kitchen, which used to be tucked into the interior and did not have any windows, is now part of one large space that also contains the dining and living areas. "I wanted a sense of openness, something that allowed you to breathe."
Into the resulting blank space stepped Darryl Carter, who planned a straightforward approach. "My vision was to respect the architecture," he says. "All the traditional fittings were very foreign to the space because the exterior is so modern. Instead of trying to make swags and jabots fit over a very plain window, we opted to respond to the window as it was."
Carter's monochromatic scheme came as a surprise to Goodhand. "If you'd have told me up front that we would be furnishing the apartment almost completely in shades of white and black," he says, "it would have sounded completely scary to me." But Carter has built his reputation on his skill with the subtleties of texture and color -- particularly white. "The vocabulary in a wide, open setting needs to be very thoughtful and harmonious -- from the furniture to the surface selection," says Carter, "because the space reads as one. I don't think abrupt color changes are the intelligent way to go."
Placing antiques in a modern space and making it all look right takes a careful eye and conscientious editing. "Everything has to stand on its own and at the same time not overwhelm," says Carter. So, pay close attention to geometry and how each piece works with the other profiles. "A graceful curve juxtaposed against a bunch of clean, rigid lines can be very poetic," Carter instructs. And not everything has to be immaculate. "Too much perfect is how you end up with a boardroom look." A banged-up farmhouse table or an old bureau with paint flaking off can introduce a sense of ease and comfort. "Worn-out things invite you to use them, so whenever I do put something pristine in a room, I generally always want something near it with flaws that suggest you can actually touch it."
The result of Carter's design chemistry is a palpable harmony, a word that resonates for Goodhand. "The apartment represents a lot of resolution for me and Christopher: it opens a new chapter," he explains. "I don't just have an apartment. I have a home, and I plan to stay for a long time."
What the Pros Know
"With so much white around you, you're not so conscious of walls and boundaries. A room that might otherwise seem smaller feels a lot bigger and more modern," says interior and furniture designer Darryl Carter, who used Benjamin Moore's Simply White throughout the Goodhand apartment. "But texture plays a critical role when your surroundings are so cohesive," he points out. Paramount to Carter's scheme were the floors: they are reclaimed barn wood, purposely left rough and painted with Minwax's Winter White. To say that the success of the apartment hinges on them is not an understatement. They are at once tactile, elegant and subtle, providing a graceful but casual base that extends light by reflection and keeps the antiques in the space from seeming too precious. Carter adroitly employed the same formula throughout. "There's a lot of white, but everything takes the pigment differently and you get a lot of dimension just by varying the materials," he says.
