Serious Craftsmanship
Twenty years ago, John and Renate Alison’s Falls Church home was your basic builder-grade production house, built with stock plans and vanilla interiors. Since then, it has evolved into a full-blown homage to Craftsman-style architecture, with a sprinkling of Asian influence.
The couple’s first set of renovations began back in 2003 with a downstairs makeover that re-graded the backyard to create a walkout basement. A year later they moved with their three kids to Taiwan (John is a patent attorney with the international law firm Winston & Strawn) and the house stood dormant.
Phase two kicked off in 2008 when the family was once again stateside. “We started working on a redesign of the house that would substantially open up and change the configuration of the first and second floors,” says John, who grew up in California and has an affinity for Craftsman architecture, a bungalow style that rose to prominence on the West Coast at the turn of the 20th century. Renate, a native of Austria, holds a similar appreciation for the aesthetic, which embraces natural materials.
Subsequent upgrades brought a new sunroom and a renovated kitchen, with finishes such as granite countertops and copper quartzite floor tiles bordered by birch inlays.
Octagons—a shape that invites good fortune in Asian culture—appear throughout the home in tray ceilings and decorative flooring patterns. “John is a very sophisticated individual. They wanted to fix the chi of the house,” says Falls Church-based architect Seth Ballard, who has overseen every round of renovations from the beginning. “It had no flow as you walked through it.”