When Lauren and Jon Liles bought their one-story Cape Cod 16 years ago in Arlington’s Penrose neighborhood, they always figured they would build a second floor someday. Over the years, they refinished the basement and “redid the kitchen a couple of times—just cosmetic stuff,” Lauren says.
But during the pandemic lockdown, when both parents were working from home (she’s an event planner; he’s an economic analyst), the 1,188-square-foot house, originally built in 1967, felt too small for their family of four. They turned to Alair Homes Arlington to transform their little starter home into a modern farmhouse with clean lines, lots of sunlight and room to move.
Now roughly 3,100 square feet, it includes his and her home offices, a rooftop deck and plenty of thoughtfully designed storage space. “We’ve changed it completely,” Lauren says. “We’ve essentially built a new house.”
Lauren and Jon met their senior year at James Madison University. After graduating in 2004, they rented a house with two other college friends in Penrose and later moved to Fairfax. When they started house-hunting for a place of their own in 2007, they wanted to return to Arlington—ideally to the neighborhood they knew and loved.
At the time, Lauren was working in Alexandria and Jon was working in Tysons. “Arlington was kind of the perfect location because it was really central for both of our commutes,” she says.
Jon proposed soon after they closed on the house in October of 2007 and they married in 2009. A decade later they had two sons, Caleb and Ethan (now 10 and 4). That’s when the cute little house on the postage-stamp-size lot began to feel cramped. They decided to renovate instead of relocating. “We didn’t want to leave,” Lauren says. “Moving wasn’t an option.”
The couple spent about a year interviewing builders before hiring Alair Homes, getting permits and ordering materials so that the renovation could start in March 2022. With Alair’s help, they met with several interior designers and selected Sarah Powers, owner and principal designer of BraePark Design.
The construction team kept the home’s foundation and built upward, gutting the first floor and adding two more floors on top of it.
“It was brought down to the studs,” says Jason Chaney, general manager of Alair Homes Arlington. “We pretty much went straight up.”
Usually, Chaney says, the design solution for a whole-house remodel includes a lateral addition, but in this case the lot was too tight. There wasn’t room to expand into the side yard or out back. (They had to get a special permit for the front porch.)
Before the renovation, the first floor contained “everything,” Lauren says—the kitchen, dining room, living room and three bedrooms. Now, the house has a clearer delineation of public and private spaces. The main level includes a spacious kitchen, dining room, living room, mudroom, powder room and Lauren’s home office. The bedrooms occupy another level.
Open and gleaming with natural light that pours in from windows on three sides, the new kitchen features painted white oak cabinets, a textured tile backsplash, gold fixtures and a quartz waterfall island. It connects seamlessly to the living room with a continuous flow of engineered white oak flooring.
“I think our previous kitchen probably could have fit inside the island,” Lauren says. “It was very enclosed, so if you were in the kitchen…you were cut off from whatever was going on in the rest of the house. Now I can be in there making dinner while the kids are watching TV, and we can all be having a conversation.”
The color palette throughout the house is mostly neutral, which Chaney says makes the interiors feel bigger. Pops of color come through in furnishings such as a navy chair, emerald curtains and patterned area rugs.
In Lauren’s home office, the accent color is pink, including a pink desk chair and a rug with blush tones. “It’s my space,” she says. “Living in a house with four boys—if you count the dog—it’s the only place I can get away with it. It’s my favorite place.”
Building vertically on the home’s existing footprint was a necessity, but it also allowed Alair Homes to create a stacked floor plan that is more logical and functional. The new second story has four bedrooms, including a primary suite with a small balcony, a guest room and bath, and separate boys’ bedrooms connected by a jack-and-jill bathroom.
There’s a laundry room, too. “It’s now on the same level as the bedrooms, which is just so much more convenient [than carrying laundry down to the basement],” Lauren says. “When you’ve got two boys, you are constantly doing laundry.” Powers outfitted the utilitarian space with a farm-style apron sink and a patterned floor that looks like carpet but is actually porcelain tile by Annie Selke.
Jon’s home office shares the uppermost floor with a space they refer to as “the loft,” and a rooftop deck with views of the Washington Monument.
The finished basement on the lower level is now a casual hangout zone for the kids.
During the eight-month renovation, the family rented a home a couple blocks away in the same neighborhood.Being close by made weekly meetings with their renovation project manager and interior designer easy to manage.
“I felt like we knew what was going on and what would be coming up the next week, so that there really were never any major surprises,” Lauren says. “Nothing was stressful.”
The Liles family moved back into their newly renovated home right before Thanksgiving in 2022.
“The thing that makes me happiest about this project is the absolute pure excitement and joy that the clients have for their house now,” Powers says. “I love the finishes. I love the way it looks. But the joy they find in this home is so rewarding.”
Every member of the family has their own dedicated space, Chaney adds. “They didn’t have that before.”
“It’s everything we need,” Lauren says. “There are spaces for us to be together. Everyone has their own separate space, and there’s space for us to grow into. It’s just a happy place for us to be a family.”
Wendy Kantor loves watching HGTV and home design shows.