We were first approached to do Design Home 2016 by Philadelphia magazine in the summer of 2015. This was not an accident, but by design. It was an invitation sent in response to our own well-known desire to break out of the cookie cutter style we felt we were feeling in Philadelphia. We wanted to do something fresh, something new, something modern, something contemporary in America’s most historic city where bricks and cobble stones are revered like Roman statues.
Our first Design Home participation was in 2012, when we had been selected to play the role of the sole overseeing Interior Design firm chosen to work with the developer and architect to design, plan, build, finish and furnish the Design Home.
Working closely with the developer and architect, the 2012 Design Home team met weekly and studied every aspect of the project in exacting detail, usually three to four times over. Every space plan was considered and modified. Numerous changes, additions, deletions and refinements were made. Kitchens were enlarged, rooms were enlarged, drywall spec rooms became wood clad study’s. We made an already great plan, a superb plan and the changes we conceived and fought for would become the new normal in what should be done. Changes that would be realized many times over in future models. All the obsessing in the end made it and many subsequent houses, much better projects.
Our joint efforts and collective brainstorming created a mind meld of some of the very best designers, builders, architects and craftsmen in the Delaware Valley. It was a perfect example of how a great design team working towards a common goal could achieve a quality end-project with professional results.
At that time the project was a traditional Okie inspired Newtown Square, Pennsylvania Farm House. Richardson Brognard Okie, Jr. (1875-1945) was born in Camden, NJ and grew up in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and became an American architect noted for his Colonial-Revival houses and his sensitive restorations of historic buildings. This was our inspiration.
While working on Design Home 2012 the WPL Interior Design team started theorizing about what it would be like to do a Design Home that was Modern, Contemporary and Urban in America’s most historic and a Colonial city.
By the way, Modern to us refers to the Modern Movement which began in the 1920’s and 1930’s known as the International Movement which was characterized by such great architects as LeCorbuier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson. It was not just a style of architecture but an entire social movement responding to modern technology and the machine age of the time. It is a style that is still inspiring architects today. Add to that the Contemporary style which refers to “what is happening now” and you blend the modernism influences with the 21st century apropos technology and building materials. This is why we distinguish between modern and contemporary and embrace them both. Modern provides us a point of view and great period of architecture from which to draw inspiration and Contemporary embodies the modern principals into today’s materials, colors, sensibilities and lifestyles. Both are important and both enforce the other.
So our theory was that one could design a project that would be both cutting edge in technology and design yet be inspired by the great modernists of the past. We theorized on how avant-garde it would be to introduce a Colonial city to something modern that would look and be in perfect harmony with its surroundings, the colonial brick clad neighborhoods of America’s most historic city. Yet, at the same time, be something that felt at home in its surrounding even in its non-Colonial architecture. We began to fantasize about “Okie meets I.M. Pei” and this discussion of what could be in Philadelphia continued never yielding any results or answers. But it certainly made us think of the contrast between older cities with lots of history juxtaposed against new shinny modern cities with less history and more modernism and how one could achieve a balance of the two.
Fast forward to four years later and Philadelphia magazine had found an interested partner/developer who was working in a contemporary style in some of the oldest and most historic neighborhoods of the city. This was a forward thinking developer who was interested in doing Design Home (no small feat) who needed a common point of view, as no design home had ever been this modern and this would push the envelope.
It was Philadelphia magazine who remembered WPL Interior Design’s impassioned plea of we don’t just have to be a traditional colonial city on the east coast but rather we could rival major architectural cities like Chicago, if we only had the confidence, self-esteem and knowledge to do so. And so goes the story when impassioned Interior Designers meet their prince and benefactor. A young urban in tune developer with a great architectural team who “got it” and a marriage was made in heaven.
We met, we talked and the message of WPL was not lost over time, but rather remembered by the magazine who said if there is one Interior Design firm in Philadelphia who can pull this off, it’s WPL Interior Design. They have been preaching for years how Philadelphia needs good modern/contemporary residential architecture.
WE were sold, they were sold, and the rest, as they say, was history. A marriage made in heaven. A developer, an architect and an interior design team that all saw eye to eye and all gave their everything to achieve something truly special and unique on Front Street in Philadelphia, one of America’s oldest streets.
