Architect Carmel Greer, principal of the six-year-old firm District Design, doesn?t impose a particular style on her residential projects. Instead, she lets a home tell her what it wants to be. ?I never fight a house,? says Greer. ?The house will always win.?
Her design approach is to play up the best architectural features of a home while creating spaces for contemporary living. In a recent DC row-house renovation, she salvaged the old floor joists and turned them into bedroom wall paneling. For another townhouse redesign, she converted the library into the dining room, but preserved the wood shelving and repainted it. ?I try to leave some of the original character of a house intact,? says the architect.
Greer treated her own home the same way, enhancing the good bones of a 1950s brick colonial in DC?s Kent neighborhood that she and husband Dan Baum, CEO of a public relations firm, purchased and remodeled in 2016. ?It had been on the market forever,? she recalls. ?No one else wanted it because it was so bizarrely chopped up and had not been updated since the 1970s.? With its six bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms, the center-hall colonial was spacious enough for the couple, their four children and dog Aida without the need for an addition. ?It is fundamentally a sturdy, well-built house and on a tremendous amount of land for the city,? notes Greer.

BEFORE: The kitchen prior to renovation.
BEFORE: The ...